s. Personally, I can never read one single item in
the bill, much less the cost, and I can only gaze in hopeless
bewilderment at the long-tailed hieroglyphics, recalling a backward
child's first attempts at "pot-hooks."

The infinite capacity of the French for taking trouble, and their
minute attention to detail, tend towards unnecessary complications of
simple matters. Thus, on English railways we find two main types of
signals sufficient for our wants, whereas on French lines there are
five different main types of signal. On English lines we have two
secondary signals, against eight in France, all differing widely in
shape and appearance. Again, on a French locomotive the driver has far
more combinations at his command for efficient working under varying
conditions, than is the case in England. The trend of the national mind
is towards complicating details rather than simplifying them.

Delightful as was the winter climate of Nyons, that sun-scorched little
cup amongst the hills became a place of positive torment as the summer
advanced. The heat was absolutely unendurable. Day and night, thousands
of cicades (the cigales of the French) kept up their incessant "dzig,
dzig, dzig," a sound very familiar to those who have sojourned in the
tropics. Has Nature given this singular insect the power of dispensing
with sleep? What possible object can it hope to attain by keeping up
this incessant din? If a love-song, surely the most optimistic cicada
must realise that his amorous strains can never reach the ears of his
lady-love, since hundreds of his brethren are all keeping up the same
perpetual purposeless chirping, which must obviously drown any
individual effort. Have the cicadas a double dose of gaiete francaise
in their composition, and is this their manner of expressing it? Are
they, like some young men we know, always yearning to turn night into
day? All these are, and will remain, unsolved problems?

As I found the summer heat of Nyons unbearable, I went back to England
for a holiday, and, on the morning of my departure, climbed some olive
trees and captured fourteen live cicadas, whom I imprisoned in a
perforated cardboard box, and took back to London with me. Twelve of
them survived the journey, and as soon as I had arrived, I carefully
placed the cicadas on the boughs of the trees in our garden in Green
Street, Grosvenor Square. Conceive the surprise of these travelled
insects at finding themselves on the soot-la