pare allowance would enable us to reach
Lyons. Owing to a day's delay in Marseilles, we had left that city with
but fifteen francs each; the incessant storms of winter and the worn-out
state of our shoes, which were no longer proof against water or mud,
prolonged our journey considerably, so that by starting before dawn and
walking till dark, we were only able to make thirty miles a day. We
could always procure beds for five sous, and as in the country inns one
is only charged for what he chooses to order, our frugal suppers cost us
but little. We purchased bread and cheese in the villages, and made our
breakfasts and dinners on a bank by the roadside, or climbed the rocks
and sat down by the source of some trickling rill. This simple fare had
an excellent relish, and although we walked in wet clothes from morning
till night, often laying down on the damp, cold earth to rest, our
health was never affected.

It is worth all the toil and privation we have as yet undergone, to
gain, from actual experience, the blessed knowledge that man always
retains a kindness and brotherly sympathy towards his fellow--that under
all the weight of vice and misery which a grinding oppression of soul
and body brings on the laborers of earth, there still remain many bright
tokens of a better nature. Among the starving mountaineers of the
Hartz--the degraded peasantry of Bohemia--the savage _contadini_ of
Central Italy, or the dwellers on the hills of Provence and beside the
swift Rhone, we almost invariably found kind, honest hearts, and an
aspiration for something better, betokening the consciousness that such
brute-like, obedient existence was not their proper destiny. We found
few so hardened as to be insensible to a kind look or a friendly word,
and nothing made us forget we were among strangers so much as the many
tokens of sympathy which met us when least looked for. A young
Englishman, who had traveled on foot from Geneva to Rome, enduring many
privations on account of his reduced circumstances, said to me, while
speaking on this subject: "A single word of kindness from a stranger
would make my heart warm and my spirits cheerful, for days afterwards."
There is not so much evil in man as men would have us believe; and it is
a happy comfort to know and feel this.

Leaving our little inn before day break next morning, we crossed the
Sorgues, grown muddy since its infancy at Vaucluse, like many a young
soul, whose mountain purity goes o