'Yes.'

'Why then,' I said, 'I will come in and drink.'

This book would never end if I were to attempt to write down so much
as the names of a quarter of the extraordinary things that I saw and
heard on my enchanted pilgrimage, but let me at least mention the
Commercial Traveller from Marseilles.

He talked with extreme rapidity for two hours. He had seen all the
cities in the world and he remembered their minutest details. He was
extremely accurate, his taste was abominable, his patriotism large,
his wit crude but continual, and to his German friend, to the host of
the inn, and to the blonde serving-girl, he was a familiar god. He
came, it seems, once a year, and for a day would pour out the torrent
of his travels like a waterfall of guide-books (for he gloried in
dates, dimensions, and the points of the compass in his descriptions);
then he disappeared for another year, and left them to feast on the
memory of such a revelation.

For my part I sat silent, crippled with fatigue, trying to forget my
wounded feet, drinking stoup after stoup of beer and watching the
Phocean. He was of the old race you see on vases in red and black;
slight, very wiry, with a sharp, eager, but well-set face, a small,
black, pointed beard, brilliant eyes like those of lizards, rapid
gestures, and a vivacity that played all over his features as sheet
lightning does over the glow of midnight in June.

That delta of the Rhone is something quite separate from the rest of
France. It is a wedge of Greece and of the East thrust into the Gauls.
It came north a hundred years ago and killed the monarchy. It caught
the value in, and created, the great war song of the Republic.

I watched the Phocean. I thought of a man of his ancestry three
thousand years ago sitting here at the gates of these mountains
talking of his travels to dull, patient, and admiring northerners, and
travelling for gain up on into the Germanics, and I felt the
changeless form of Europe under me like a rock.

When he heard I was walking to Rome, this man of information turned
off his flood into another channel, as a miller will send the racing
water into a side sluice, and he poured out some such torrent as this:

'Do not omit to notice the famous view S.E. from the Villa So and So
on Monte Mario; visit such and such a garden, and hear Mass in such
and such a church. Note the curious illusion produced on the piazza of
St Peter's by the interior measurements of the trapez