I had a great deal of healthy pleasure from their manoeuvres, and took good care to miss as few performances as possible; and I found that even the _Cigarette_, while he pretended to despise my enthusiasm, was more or less a devotee himself. There is something highly absurd in the exposition of such toys to the outrages of winter on a housetop. They would be more in keeping in a glass case before a Nuernberg clock. Above all, at night, when the children are abed, and even grown people are snoring under quilts, does it not seem impertinent to leave these ginger-bread figures winking and tinkling to the stars and the rolling moon? The gargoyles may fitly enough twist their ape-like heads; fitly enough may the potentate bestride his charger, like a centurion in an old German print of the _Via Dolorosa_; but the toys should be put away in a box among some cotton, until the sun rises, and the children are abroad again to be amused. In Compiegne post-office a great packet of letters awaited us; and the authorities were, for this occasion only, so polite as to hand them over upon application. In some ways, our journey may be said to end with this letter-bag at Compiegne. The spell was broken. We had partly come home from that moment. No one should have any correspondence on a journey; it is bad enough to have to write, but the receipt of letters is the death of all holiday feeling. "Out of my country and myself I go." I wish to take a dive among new conditions for a while, as into another element. I have nothing to do with my friends or my affections for the time; when I came away, I left my heart at home in a desk, or sent it forward with my portmanteau to await me at my destination. After my journey is over, I shall not fail to read your admirable letters with the attention they deserve. But I have paid all this money, look you, and paddled all these strokes, for no other purpose than to be abroad; and yet you keep me at home with your perpetual communications. You tug the string, and I feel that I am a tethered bird. You pursue me all over Europe with the little vexations that I came away to avoid. There is no discharge in the war of life, I am well aware; but shall there not be so much as a week's furlough?