least there are some
consolations in travelling, when a fellow has but one little portmanteau
or bag which he can easily shoulder, and thinks of the innumerable bags
and trunks which the married man and the father drags after him. The
married Briton on a tour is but a luggage overseer: his luggage is his
morning thought, and his nightly terror. When he floats along the Rhine
he has one eye on a ruin, and the other on his luggage. When he is in
the railroad he is always thinking, or ordered by his wife to think, "is
the luggage safe?" It clings round him. It never leaves him (except
when it DOES leave him, as a trunk or two will, and make him doubly
miserable). His carpet-bags lie on his chest at night, and his wife's
forgotten bandbox haunts his turbid dreams.

I think it was after she found that Lady Kicklebury proposed to go to
the "Grand Saint Antoine" that Lady Knightsbridge put herself with
her maid into a carriage and went to the other inn. We saw her at the
cathedral, where she kept aloof from our party. Milliken went up the
tower, and so did Miss Fanny. I am too old a traveller to mount up those
immeasurable stairs, for the purpose of making myself dizzy by gazing
upon a vast map of low countries stretched beneath me, and waited with
Mrs. Milliken and her mother below.

When the tower-climbers descended, we asked Miss Fanny and her brother
what they had seen.

"We saw Captain Hicks up there," remarked Milliken. "And I am very glad
you didn't come, Lavinia my love. The excitement would have been too
much for you, quite too much."

All this while Lady Kicklebury was looking at Fanny, and Fanny was
holding her eyes down; and I knew that between her and this poor Hicks
there could be nothing serious, for she had laughed at him and mimicked
him to me half a dozen times in the course of the day.

We "do the Rubens's," as Lady Kicklebury says; we trudge from cathedral
to picture-gallery, from church to church. We see the calm old city,
with its towers and gables, the bourse, and the vast town-hall; and
I have the honor to give Lady Kicklebury my arm during these
peregrinations, and to hear a hundred particulars regarding her
ladyship's life and family. How Milliken has been recently building
at Pigeoncot; how he will have two thousand a year more when his uncle
dies; how she had peremptorily to put a stop to the assiduities of that
unprincipled young man, Lord Roughhead, whom Lavinia always detested,
and who mar