ng the place, of which you may have complained, not without
reason, are then in perfection, and the silence is broken with a
vengeance. It is difficult to imagine the grandeurs of a sham-fight--a
battle without corpses--but here you have them. First the musketry, then
the guns, with the explosion of the powder-magazine--repeated about
forty times by the mountain echoes--at the end of it. When all is over
you sit down to such a supper as Lucullus would have given a year of
life for, and which, in all probability--for he had no prudence--would
have shortened it for him. At the 'Retreat,' as it is called, among
other native delicacies, they give you fresh char cooked to a turn. I
like to think that this was the fish that Monte Christo had sent him in
a tank to Paris on the occasion of a certain banquet; but all the wealth
of the Indies could not have accomplished that; the char (in spite of
its name) does not travel.

One more reminiscence of country inns; and, though I have more of them
in the picture-gallery of my memory, I have done. I conjure up an
ivy-covered dwelling, long roofed but low, and sheltered by a lofty
hill. Its situation is quite solitary, and, save for the cry of the
seagull, there reigns about it an unbroken silence. It is on the very
highway of the world, but the road is noiseless, for it is the sea.
From the windows, all day long, we can watch the ships pass by that
carry the pilgrims of the earth, for their freight is chiefly human. It
is here 'the first ray glitters on the sail that brings our friends up
from the under world, and the last falls on that which sinks with all
we love below the verge.' Even at night there is no cessation to this
coming and going; only, a red light or a white, and the distant strokes
of a paddle-wheel in the hush of the moonless void are then the sole
signs of all this motion. What hopes and fears contend in unseen hearts
under those moving stars! Is it nothing to have the opportunity to
watch them from the ivied porch of the 'Outlook,' and to welcome the
thoughts they arouse within us? On land, too, there are stars, not made
in heaven, but their shining is intermittent. As I lie in my bed I can
see the great revolving light on the farthest point of rock that juts
to sea. That is the 'Outlook's' watchman, not of much use to it,
indeed, in a practical way, but imparting a marvellous sense of
guardianship and security.

The chief means of amusement at inns of this kind is