We found the Dutch people ceremoniously polite. They never sat down and never rose from the table, never entered a room and never left it, without bowing to all round. It always kept us in a fidget lest they should not receive like courtesy; but it is a very pleasant trait of character in a people whom we found to be not merely externally polite, but kind and cordial at heart. * * * * * At the hotels, unless they be what I have called English hotels, one usually meets with people of all countries. In one hotel in France, I was informed we had representatives of eight different nations, counting English, Scotch, and Irish as one. It has struck me, however, that although the French language is so generally spoken, the French themselves, while found travelling in every part of their own land, are very seldom seen in other countries. I was on one occasion sitting next a bright Parisian young lady, and rather wickedly, I fear, was exalting Edinburgh so as to suggest its taking the palm from Paris. She was astonished, and having asked her when she was coming to see Edinburgh, she replied very decidedly, though in the very bewitching way in which the French girls speak, ‘Jamais, ne–verre,’ which honestly meant there was no probability she would, although the emphasis no doubt was intended as a delicate rebuke to the heretical presumption of my thought. _La belle France_ is _tout le monde_ to Frenchmen; nor do they get much encouragement to cross the English Channel, for I have noticed that they are, as a rule, most unhappy sailors. One meets with all peoples and tongues and sorts at the dinner table. Now, much of comfort at that interesting time depends upon who sit next you. Dining at a long table with a large company is never so genial as dining round a smaller table in a party of six or eight. Intercourse is almost limited to those on the right and left, unless you and those opposite have strong voices and be both remarkably socially inclined. This, bad enough at home, is intensified abroad, not merely among strangers, but strangers who are foreigners, with whose language you may not be particularly acquainted. Everything, then, turns on the question, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ and in this respect one is all but entirely at the mercy of the waiters, who have not the grimmest idea of social assortment; and it may be that you are for weeks together placed next to those with whom you have no _rapport_ or fellow–feeling or congeniality of tastes—nay, with whom you may be unable to exchange a word. When it is otherwise, and people are social, intelligent, well read, and without necessarily being clever are cheerful, the dinner hour becomes a pleasant episode of the day.