glish as well as I do, and of at least
as many more who could manage to read you in the original." His town was
Worms, which Dickens afterwards saw, ". . . a fine old place, though
greatly shrunken and decayed in respect of its population; with a
picturesque old cathedral standing on the brink of the Rhine, and some
brave old churches shut up, and so hemmed in and overgrown with
vineyards that they look as if they were turning into leaves and
grapes."

He had no other adventure on the Rhine. But, on the same steamer, a not
unfamiliar bit of character greeted him in the well-known lineaments,
moral and physical, of two travelling Englishmen who had got an immense
barouche on board with them, and had no plan whatever of going anywhere
in it. One of them wanted to have this barouche wheeled ashore at every
little town and village they came to. The other was bent upon "seeing it
out," as he said--meaning, Dickens supposed, the river; though neither
of them seemed to have the slightest interest in it. "The locomotive one
would have gone ashore without the carriage, and would have been
delighted to get rid of it; but they had a joint courier, and neither of
them would part with _him_ for a moment; so they went growling and
grumbling on together, and seemed to have no satisfaction but in asking
for impossible viands on board the boat, and having a grim delight in
the steward's excuses."

From Strasburg they went by rail on the 8th to Bale, from which they
started for Lausanne next day, in three coaches, two horses to each,
taking three days for the journey: its only enlivening incident being an
uproar between the landlord of an inn on the road, and one of the
voituriers who had libelled Boniface's establishment by complaining of
the food. "After various defiances on both sides, the landlord said
'Scelerat! Mecreant! Je vous boaxerai!' to which the voiturier replied,
'Aha! Comment dites-vous? Voulez-vous boaxer? Eh? Voulez-vous? Ah!
Boaxez-moi donc! Boaxez-moi!'--at the same time accompanying these
retorts with gestures of violent significance, which explained that this
new verb-active was founded on the well-known English verb to boax, or
box. If they used it once, they used it at least a hundred times, and
goaded each other to madness with it always." The travellers reached the
hotel Gibbon at Lausanne on the evening of Thursday the 11th of June;
having been tempted as they came along to rest somewhat short of it, by
a deli