to
Chamounix, we found the greater part of the inns shut up and the people
gone. No visitors whatsoever, and plenty of snow. These were the very
best circumstances under which to see the place, and we stayed a couple
of days at the Hotel de Londres (hastily re-furbished for our
entertainment), and climbed through the snow to the Mer de Glace, and
thoroughly enjoyed it. Then we went, in mule procession (I walking) to
the old hotel at Martigny, where Collins was ill, and I suppose I bored
Egg to death by talking all the evening about the time when you and I
were there together. Naples (a place always painful to me, in the
intense degradation of the people) seems to have only three classes of
inhabitants left in it--priests, soldiers (standing army one hundred
thousand strong), and spies. Of macaroni we ate very considerable
quantities everywhere; also, for the benefit of Italy, we took our share
of every description of wine. At Naples I found Layard, the Nineveh
traveller, who is a friend of mine and an admirable fellow; so we
fraternised and went up Vesuvius together, and ate more macaroni and
drank more wine. At Rome, the day after our arrival, they were making a
saint at St. Peter's; on which occasion I was surprised to find what an
immense number of pounds of wax candles it takes to make the regular,
genuine article. From Turin to Paris, over the Mont Cenis, we made only
one journey. The Rhone, being frozen and foggy, was not to be navigated,
so we posted from Lyons to Chalons, and everybody else was doing the
like, and there were no horses to be got, and we were stranded at
midnight in amazing little cabarets, with nothing worth mentioning to
eat in them, except the iron stove, which was rusty, and the
billiard-table, which was musty. We left Turin on a Tuesday evening, and
arrived in Paris on a Friday evening; where I found my son Charley,
hot--or I should rather say cold--from Germany, with his arms and legs
so grown out of his coat and trousers, that I was ashamed of him, and
was reduced to the necessity of taking him, under cover of night, to a
ready-made establishment in the Palais Royal, where they put him into
balloon-waisted pantaloons, and increased my confusion. Leaving Calais
on the evening of Sunday, the 10th of December; fact of distinguished
author's being aboard, was telegraphed to Dover; thereupon authorities
of Dover Railway detained train to London for distinguished author's
arrival, rather to the ex