We compared the volumes after supper, and one was the mate of the other.

The inn dining-room had one long table stretched down its entire length,
heaped with wild meats and honey and pastries and fish in abundance.
General Jackson sat at one end, and at the other sat the landlord,
explaining to all his guests what each dish was, and urging good
appetite. I sat by Louis Philippe, whose quality was known only to
myself, with Doctor Chantry on the other side fretting for the
attendance to which Jean had used him.

My master was so tired that I put him early to bed; and then sat talking
nearly all night with the gracious gentleman to whom I felt bound by
gratitude and by blood.

III

Dieppe, high and glaring white above the water, will always symbolize to
me the gate of France. The nobility of that view remained in my thoughts
when half the distance to Paris was traversed.

I could shut my eyes and see it as I lay on the straw in a post-house
stable. A square hole in the front of the grenier gave upon the
landscape. Even respectable houses in that part of the country were then
built with few or no windows; but delicious masses of grayness they
were, roofed with thick and overhanging thatch.

"The stables of France are nothing but covered dunghills," Doctor
Chantry grumbled; so when I crept with the Indian to lodgings over the
cattle, one of the beds in the house was hired for the gouty master.
Even at inns there were two or three beds in a room where they set us to
dine.

"An English inn-keeper would throw their furniture into the fire!" he
cried in a language fortunately not understood.

"But we have two good rooms on the ground floor, and another for
Skenedonk," I sometimes remonstrated with him, "at three shillings and
sixpence a day, in your money."

"You would not see any man, let his rank be what it may," Doctor
Chantry retorted, "dining in his bedroom, in England. And look at these
walls!--papered with two or three kinds of paper, the bare spots hung
with tapestry moth-eaten and filled with spiders! And what have we for
table?--a board laid on cross-bars! And the oaken chairs are
rush-bottomed, and so straight the backs are a persecution! The door
hinges creak in these inns, the wind blows through--"

So his complaints went on, for there never was a man who got so much out
of small miseries. Skenedonk and I must have failed to see all in our
travels that he put before us. For we were full of