I used to enjoy donkey-races as a boy, when at our country feasts each boy rode his neighbour’s donkey, and the last past the post was the winner, and should probably have gone up the hill to witness a French race, but that I found that here each boy rides his own donkey, and the first past the post wins. This takes all the fun out of the race, so I abstained. There were a few second-rate fireworks after dark, and the Casino and most of the hotels were prettily lighted, and the trees hung with yellow paper lanterns which looked like big oranges, but to the Englishman, more or less accustomed to the great Brock’s performances, the illumination business was very flat. Comité des Fêtes. 17th July 1893. An Englishman can scarcely avoid the danger of having his national vanity fed in this La Bourboule. A new hotel is being built on a fine site above the Dordogne, just beyond the new Casino, and I hear on the best authority that the proprietor means to have it furnished from top to bottom by Messrs. Maple. As this will involve paying a duty of from 30 to 50 per cent on the articles imported, it is not easy to see where the profit can come in, as the most prejudiced John Bull will scarcely deny that native French furniture is about as good, and not very much dearer than English. I can only account for it by the desire of all purveyors here--from the chief hotel-keepers to the dealers in the pretty Auvergne jewellery and the donkey-women--to get us as customers,--not, perhaps, so much from love or admiration for us, as because we have so much less power of remonstrance or resistance to their charges. Unless he sees some flagrant overcharge in his hotel bill, the Briton does not care to air his colloquial French in discussing items with the former, who only meet him with polite shrugs; and as for the others, they at once fall back upon an Auvergnese _patois_, at least as different from ordinary French as a Durham miner’s vernacular is from a West countryman’s. What satisfaction can come of remonstrating about 2 fr., even in faultless grammatical French, when it only brings on you a torrent of explanation of which you cannot understand one word in ten?