Bordeaux and Seltzer-water.

. . . . . .

The morning comes--I don't know a pleasanter feeling than that of waking
with the sun shining on objects quite new, and (although you have made
the voyage a dozen times,) quite strange. Mrs. X. and you occupy a very
light bed, which has a tall canopy of red "percale;" the windows are
smartly draped with cheap gaudy calicoes and muslins; there are little
mean strips of carpet about the tiled floor of the room, and yet all
seems as gay and as comfortable as may be--the sun shines brighter than
you have seen it for a year, the sky is a thousand times bluer, and
what a cheery clatter of shrill quick French voices comes up from the
court-yard under the windows! Bells are jangling; a family, mayhap, is
going to Paris, en poste, and wondrous is the jabber of the courier, the
postilion, the inn-waiters, and the lookers-on. The landlord calls
out for "Quatre biftecks aux pommes pour le trente-trois,"--(O my
countrymen, I love your tastes and your ways!)--the chambermaid is
laughing and says, "Finissez donc, Monsieur Pierre!" (what can they be
about?)--a fat Englishman has opened his window violently, and says,
"Dee dong, garsong, vooly voo me donny lo sho, ou vooly voo pah?" He has
been ringing for half an hour--the last energetic appeal succeeds, and
shortly he is enabled to descend to the coffee-room, where, with three
hot rolls, grilled ham, cold fowl, and four boiled eggs, he makes what
he calls his first FRENCH breakfast.

It is a strange, mongrel, merry place, this town of Boulogne; the
little French fishermen's children are beautiful, and the little French
soldiers, four feet high, red-breeched, with huge pompons on their caps,
and brown faces, and clear sharp eyes, look, for all their littleness,
far more military and more intelligent than the heavy louts one has seen
swaggering about the garrison towns in England. Yonder go a crowd of
bare-legged fishermen; there is the town idiot, mocking a woman who is
screaming "Fleuve du Tage," at an inn-window, to a harp, and there are
the little gamins mocking HIM. Lo! these seven young ladies, with red
hair and green veils, they are from neighboring Albion, and going
to bathe. Here comes three Englishmen, habitues evidently of the
place,--dandy specimens of our countrymen: one wears a marine dress,
another has a shooting dress, a third has a blouse and a pair of
guiltless spurs--all have as much hair on t