With clothing that could be packed in a single portmanteau and a dear little donkey that, besides carrying the portmanteau, would carry them by turns, Mary and Claire were certain they could journey to Switzerland with keen enjoyment and no excessive fatigue; whilst Shelley (an excellent walker) could, of course, trudge the whole way on foot, bearing a small basket of provisions for their frugal meals. The scheme looked well on paper; and had circumstances been as compliant as the adventurers were imaginative the plan would have worked admirably. The portmanteau would have been none too heavy and the donkey none too weak; every village in which they desired to rest would have afforded them clean beds and sufficient cookery; the weather would never have been too hot, the roads never too stony. But the circumstances were too rigorous and unyielding. It was to their misfortune that, instead of buying a competent ass in the Parisian ass-market, Claire and Shelley selected a diminutive animal, that in less than twenty-four hours proved insufficient for the place. Still it was all merriment at the outset to the girls, who prattled merrily on the way from Paris (which they left at four p.m.) to Charenton, which they entered some six hours later. Dressed in black silk, the sisters (on leaving coach and taking the donkey at the barrier) congratulated themselves on their choice of a costume, the lightness of their portmanteau, the mild intelligence of their dear little donkey. At the first view of Charenton in the valley watered by the Seine, Claire (in sly raillery at Shelley) ejaculated, ‘Oh! this is beautiful enough: let us live here.’ In the morning, when, on recognizing the donkey’s incompetence they replaced it with a mule (bought for ten Napoleons), the girls may have been troubled with doubts whether ‘black’ was the best ‘colour for standing white dust.’ Soon the temper of the tourists was tested by trials more grievous than fatigue and the dust of hot highways. The fare of the _cabarets_ was coarse, the company in them not chiefly remarkable for refinement, the bedding neither comfortable nor clean. The peasants might have been something less morose to gentle strangers, in no degree responsible for the excesses of the brutal Cossacks. On nearing Trois Maisons, Shelley sprained his ankle so badly that the girls were compelled to walk an entire day’s journey and let him ride on their mule. At Troyes he could scarcely put his lame foot to the ground; Mary was ‘dead-beat’ with fatigue; Claire could no longer cry out gleefully, ‘I am glad we did not stay at Charenton, but let us live here.’ The bright girl’s cheeriest cry just then may well have been ‘Beds,--and let’s sleep here for ever.’