tty
nearly to go out of the town to see a sunset without having to think
about Aboukir and Alexandria. But that's Paris all over. There isn't a
street, or a public building, or a statue, or a fountain, or a thing
that doesn't shout at you, 'Look at me! Think about me! Your admiration
or your life!' Those Frenchmen don't mind it because it only repeats
what they're always saying themselves, but if you're a foreigner it gets
on your nerves. That city is too uniformly fine to be of much use to
me--it keeps me all the time wondering why I'm not in one eternal good
humour to match. There's good old London now--always looks, I should
think, just as you feel. Looks like history, too, and change, and
contrast, and the different varieties of the human lot."

"I see what you mean, poppa," I said. "There's too much equality in
Paris, isn't there--to be interesting," but the Senator was too deeply
engaged in getting out momma's smelling salts to corroborate this
interpretation.

It is a very long way to Genoa if you don't stop at Aix-les-Bains or
anywhere--twenty-four hours--but Mont Cenis occurs in the night, which
is suitable in a tunnel. There came a chill through the darkness that
struck to one's very marrow, and we all rose with one accord and groped
about for more rugs. When broad daylight came it was Savoy, and we
realised what we had been through. The Senator was inclined to deplore
missing the realisation of the Mont Cenis, and it was only when momma
said it was a pity he hadn't taken a train that would have brought us
through in the daytime and enabled him to examine it, that he ceased to
express regret. My parents are often vehicles of philosophy for each
other.

Besides, in the course of the morning the Senator acknowledged that he
got more tunnels than he had any idea he had paid for. They came with a
precipitancy that interfered immensely with any connected idea of the
scenery, though momma, in my interest, did her best to form one. "Note,
my love," she said, as we began to penetrate the frontier country, "that
majestic blue summit on the horizon to the left"--obliteration, and
another tunnel! "_Don't_ miss that jagged line of snows just beyond the
back of poppa's head, dear one. Quick! they are melting away!"--but the
next tunnel was quicker. "Put down that the dazzling purity of these
lovely peaks must be realised, for it cannot be"--darkness, and the
blight of another tunnel. It was very hard on momma's imaginat