'

Whatever their previous tastes, men soon conform to the habits of a
nation, and these arbitrary boundaries of the gentlemen of the red tape
become like Nature's own frontiers of flood or mountain. Not but it must
have been somewhat puzzling in the good days of the Consulate and the
Empire to trim one's sails quick enough for the changes of the political
hurricane. You were an Italian yesterday, you are a Frenchman to-day;
you went to bed a Prussian, and you awoke a Dutchman. These were sore
trials, and had they been pushed much further, must have led to the most
strange misconceptions and mistakes.

Now, with a word of apology for the digression, let me come back to the
cause of it--and yet why should I make my excuses on this head? These
'Loiterings' of mine are as much in the wide field of dreamy thought as
over the plains and valleys of the material world. I never promised to
follow a regular track, nor did I set out on my journey bound, like a
king's messenger, to be at my destination in a given time. Not a bit
of it. I 'll take 'mine ease in mine inn.' I'll stay a week, a
fortnight--ay, a month, here, if I please it. You may not like the
accommodation, nor wish to put up with a 'settle and stewed parsnips.'
Be it so. Here we part company then. If you don't like my way of travel,
there's the diligence, or, if you prefer it, take the extra post, and
calculate, if you can, how to pay your postillion in kreutzers--invented
by the devil, I believe, to make men swear--and for miles, that change
with every little grand-duchy of three acres in extent. I wish you joy
of your travelling companions--the German who smokes, and the Frenchman
who frowns at you; the old _vrau_ who falls asleep on your shoulder, and
the _bonne_ who gives you a baby to hold in your lap. But why have I
put myself into this towering passion? Heaven knows it's not my wont And
once more to go back, and find, if I can, what I was thinking of. I have
it. This same digression of mine was _apropos_ to the scene I witnessed,
as our breakfast concluded at the chateau.

All the world was to figure on horseback--the horses themselves no bad
evidence of the exertions used to mount the party. Here was a rugged
pony from the Ardennes, with short neck and low shoulder, his head broad
as a bull's, and his counter like the bow of a Dutch galliot; there, a
great Flemish beast, seventeen hands high, with a tail festooned over
a straw 'bustle,' and even still hang