eech, caused by a
short tongue, and aggravated by a villanous little black pipe clutched
between his remaining teeth, we got through a large amount of question
and answer respecting the country through which we passed. Of course,
the reins were carried through rings low down on the kicking-strap,
ingeniously placed so that each whisk of the horse's tail caught one or
other rein; and then the process of extraction was a somewhat dangerous
one, for there was no splashboard, and the driver had to stow his legs
away out of reach, before commencing operations. The landlord of the inn
at Muehlinen, on the road from Kandersteg to Thun, has a worse
arrangement than even this, both reins passing through one small leather
loop at the top of the kicking-strap; so that when the horse on one
occasion ran away down a steep hill in consequence of the break refusing
to act, the man in his flurry could not tell which rein to pull, to
steer clear of the wall of rock on one side, and the unfenced slope on
the other, and finally flung himself out in despair, leaving his English
cargo behind.

There has evidently been at some time a vast lake near Besancon, and the
old bottom of the lake is now covered with heavy meadow-grass, while the
corn-fields and villages creep down from the higher grounds, on the
remains of promontories which stretch out into the plain. The people are
in constant fear of inundation, and the driver informed me that in
winter large parts of the plain are flooded, the superfluous waters
vanishing after a time into a great hole, whose powers of digestion he
could not explain. The villages which lie on the shores, as it were, of
the lake, rejoice in church-towers with bulbous domes, rising out of
rich clusters of trees, and the early bells rang out through the crisp
air with something of a Belgian sweetness. Farther on, the road passed
through glorious wheat, clean as on an English model farm, save where
some picturesque farmer had devoted a corner to the growth of poppies.
Here, as elsewhere, potatoes did not grow in ridges, but each root had a
little hillock to itself; an unnatural early training which may account
for the strange appearance of _pommes de terre au naturel_.

Anyone who has driven through the morning air for an hour or two before
breakfast, will understand the satisfaction with which, about seven
o'clock, we deciphered a complicated milestone into 14 kilometres from
Besancon, which meant breakfast at the