n assure you. I could have borne a world of
punch in the rumble and been none the worse for it. There was an
uncommonly cool inn that night, and quite a monstrous establishment at
Auxonne the next night, full of flatulent passages and banging doors.
The next night we passed at Montbard, where there is one of the very
best little inns in all France. The next at Sens, and so we got here.
The roads were bad, but not very for French roads. There was no
deficiency of horses anywhere; and after Pontarlier the weather was
really not too cold for comfort. They weighed our plate at the frontier
custom-house, spoon by spoon, and fork by fork, and we lingered about
there, in a thick fog and a hard frost, for three long hours and a half,
during which the officials committed all manner of absurdities, and got
into all sorts of disputes with my brave courier. This was the only
misery we encountered--except leaving Lausanne, and that was enough to
last us and _did_ last us all the way here. We are living on it now. I
felt, myself, much as I should think the murderer felt on that fair
morning when, with his gray-haired victim (those unconscious gray hairs,
soon to be bedabbled with blood), he went so far towards heaven as the
top of that mountain of St. Bernard without one touch of remorse. A
weight is on my breast. The only difference between me and the murderer
is, that his weight was guilt and mine is regret.

I haven't a word of news to tell you. I shouldn't write at all if I were
not the vainest man in the world, impelled by a belief that you will be
glad to hear from me, even though you hear no more than that I have
nothing to say. "Dombey" is doing wonders. It went up, after the
publication of the second number, over the thirty thousand. This is such
a very large sale, so early in the story, that I begin to think it will
beat all the rest. Keeley and his wife are making great preparations
for producing the Christmas story, and I have made them (as an old stage
manager) carry out one or two expensive notions of mine about scenery
and so forth--in particular a sudden change from the inside of the
doctor's house in the midst of the ball to the orchard in the
snow--which ought to tell very well. But actors are so bad, in general,
and the best are spread over so many theatres, that the "cast" is black
despair and moody madness. There is no one to be got for Marion but a
certain Miss ----, I am afraid--a pupil of Miss Kelly's, who acte