ince_--that expression
which was to become later on so _toned_, as old fine colour and old fine
opinion are toned. It was the romance of travel, and it was the
_suggested_ romance, flushed with suppositions and echoes, with
implications and memories, memories of one's "reading," save the mark!
all the more that our proper bestowal required two carriages, in which
we were to "post," ineffable thought, and which bristled with every kind
of contradiction of common experience. The postilion, in a costume
rather recalling, from the halls of Ferrero, that of my debardeur,
bobbed up and down, the Italian courier, Jean Nadali, black-whiskered
and acquired in London, sat in the rumble along with Annette Godefroi of
Metz, fresh-coloured, broad-faced and fair-braided, a "bonne Lorraine"
if ever there was, acquired in New York: I enjoy the echo of their very
names, neither unprecedented nor irreproducible, yet which melt together
for me, to intensification, with all the rest; with the recovered
moment, above all, of our pause at the inn-door in the cool sunshine--we
had mounted and mounted--during which, in my absurdly cushioned state, I
took in, as I have hinted, by a long slow swig that testified to some
power of elbow, a larger draught of the wine of perception than any I
had ever before owed to a single throb of that faculty. The village
street, which was not as village streets hitherto known to me, opened
out, beyond an interval, into a high place on which perched an object
also a fresh revelation and that I recognised with a deep joy--though a
joy that was doubtless partly the sense of fantastic ease, of abated
illness and of cold chicken--as at once a castle and a ruin. The only
castle within my ken had been, by my impression, the machicolated villa
above us the previous summer at New Brighton, and as I had seen no
structure rise beyond that majesty so I had seen none abased to the
dignity of ruin. Loose boards were no expression of this latter phase,
and I was already somehow aware of a deeper note in the crumbled castle
than any note of the solid one--little experience as I had had either of
solidity. At a point in the interval, at any rate, below the slope on
which this memento stood, was a woman in a black bodice, a white shirt
and a red petticoat, engaged in some sort of field labour, the effect of
whose intervention just then is almost beyond my notation. I knew her
for a peasant in sabots--the first peasant I had ever b