hat an English innkeeper would light his fire with it.

For a table you have everywhere a board laid on cross bars, which are so
conveniently contrived as to leave room for your legs only at the end.
Oak chairs with rush bottoms, and the back universally perpendicular,
defying all idea of rest after fatigue. Doors give music as well as
entrance; the wind whistles through their chinks; and hinges grate
discord. Windows admit rain as well as light; when shut they are not
easy to open; and when open not easy to shut.

Mops, brooms, and scrubbing brushes are not in the catalogue of the
necessaries of a French inn. Bells there are none; the _fille_ must
always be bawled for; and when she appears, is neither neat, well
dressed, nor handsome. The kitchen is black with smoke; the master
commonly the cook, and the less you see of the cooking the more likely
you are to have a stomach to your dinner. The mistress rarely classes
civility or attention to her guests among the requisites of her trade.
We are so unaccustomed in England to live in our bed-chambers that it is
at first awkward in France to find that people live nowhere else. Here I
find that everybody, let his rank be what it may, lives in his
bed-chamber.

_II.--Second Journey, 1788_

August 27. Cherbourg. Not a place for a residence longer than is
necessary. I was here fleeced more infamously than at any other town in
France.

Sept. 5. To Montauban. The poor people seem poor indeed; the children
terribly ragged, if possible worse clad than if with no clothes at all;
as to shoes and stockings, they are luxuries. A beautiful girl of six or
seven playing with a stick, and smiling under such a bundle of rags as
made my heart ache to see her. One-third of this province seems
uncultivated, and nearly all of it in misery. What have kings, and
ministers, and parliaments, and states, to answer for their prejudices,
seeing millions of hands that would be industrious, idle and starving
through the execrable maxims of despotism, or the equally detestable
prejudices of a feudal nobility. Sleep at the "Lion d'Or," at Montauban,
an abominable hole.

The 8th. Enter Bas Bretagne. One recognises at once another people,
meeting numbers who know no French. Enter Guingamp by gateways, towers,
and battlements, apparently the oldest military architecture; every part
denoting antiquity, and in the best preservation. The habitations of the
poor are miserable heaps of dirt; no glass, an