; but he IS
afraid: nay, ought to be, under the circumstances. I am sure Hannibal or
Napoleon would, were they locked suddenly into a car; there kept close
prisoners for a certain number of hours, and whirled along at this dizzy
pace. You can't stop, if you would:--you may die, but you can't stop;
the engine may explode upon the road, and up you go along with it; or,
may be a bolter and take a fancy to go down a hill, or into a river:
all this you must bear, for the privilege of travelling twenty miles an
hour.

This little journey, then, from Paris to Versailles, that used to be
so merry of old, has lost its pleasures since the disappearance of the
coucous; and I would as lief have for companions the statues that lately
took a coach from the bridge opposite the Chamber of Deputies, and
stepped out in the court of Versailles, as the most part of the people
who now travel on the railroad. The stone figures are not a whit more
cold and silent than these persons, who used to be, in the old coucous,
so talkative and merry. The prattling grisette and her swain from the
Ecole de Droit; the huge Alsacian carabineer, grimly smiling under his
sandy moustaches and glittering brass helmet; the jolly nurse, in
red calico, who had been to Paris to show mamma her darling Lolo, or
Auguste;--what merry companions used one to find squeezed into the
crazy old vehicles that formerly performed the journey! But the age of
horseflesh is gone--that of engineers, economists, and calculators has
succeeded; and the pleasure of coucoudom is extinguished for ever. Why
not mourn over it, as Mr. Burke did over his cheap defence of nations
and unbought grace of life; that age of chivalry, which he lamented,
apropos of a trip to Versailles, some half a century back?

Without stopping to discuss (as might be done, in rather a neat and
successful manner) whether the age of chivalry was cheap or dear, and
whether, in the time of the unbought grace of life, there was not more
bribery, robbery, villainy, tyranny, and corruption, than exists even in
our own happy days,--let us make a few moral and historical remarks
upon the town of Versailles; where, between railroad and coucou, we are
surely arrived by this time.

The town is, certainly, the most moral of towns. You pass from the
railroad station through a long, lonely suburb, with dusty rows of
stunted trees on either side, and some few miserable beggars, idle boys,
and ragged old women under them. Be