or the night being to shut up
both windows, in order to effect, with our six breaths, a salutary
modification of the night air.

4. The banging and bumping of the carriages over the turn-tables wakes me
up as I am beginning to doze, at Fontainebleau, and again at Sens; and the
trilling and thrilling of the little telegraph bell establishes itself in
my ears, and stays there, trilling me at last into a shivering, suspicious
sort of sleep, which, with a few vaguely fretful shrugs and fidgets,
carries me as far as Tonnerre, where the 'quinze minutes d'arret'
revolutionize everything; and I get a turn or two on the platform, and
perhaps a glimpse of the stars, with promise of a clear morning; and so
generally keep awake past Mont Bard, remembering the happy walks one used
to have on the terrace under Buffon's tower, and thence watching, if
perchance, from the mouth of the high tunnel, any film of moonlight may
show the far undulating masses of the hills of Citeaux. But most likely one
knows the place where the great old view used to be only by the sensible
quickening of the pace as the train turns down the incline, and crashes
through the trenched cliffs into the confusion and high clattering vault of
the station at Dijon.

5. And as my journey is almost always in the springtime, the twisted spire
of the cathedral usually shows itself against the first grey of dawn, as we
run out again southwards: and resolving to watch the sunrise, I fall more
complacently asleep,--and the sun is really up by the time one has to
change carriages, and get morning coffee at Macon. And from Amberieux,
through the Jura valley, one is more or less feverishly happy and thankful,
not so much for being in sight of Mont Blanc again, as in having got
through the nasty and gloomy night journey; and then the sight of the Rhone
and the Saleve seems only like a dream, presently to end in nothingness;
till, covered with dust, and feeling as if one never should be fit for
anything any more, one staggers down the hill to the Hotel des Bergues, and
sees the dirtied Rhone, with its new iron bridge, and the smoke of a new
factory exactly dividing the line of the aiguilles of Chamouni.

6. That is the journey as it is now,--and as, for me, it must be; except on
foot, since there is now no other way of making it. But this _was_ the way
we used to manage it in old days:--

Very early in Continental transits we had found out that the family
travelling carriage