g them, and not
the objects which are actually under my eyes. Here is Calais. Yonder is
that commissioner I have known this score of years. Here are the
women screaming and hustling over the baggage; the people at the
passport-barrier who take your papers. My good people, I hardly see you.
You no more interest me than a dozen orange-women in Covent-Garden, or a
shop book-keeper in Oxford Street. But you make me think of a time when
you were indeed wonderful to behold--when the little French soldiers
wore white cockades in their shakos--when the diligence was forty hours
going to Paris; and the great-booted postilion, as surveyed by youthful
eyes from the coupe, with his jurons, his ends of rope for the harness,
and his clubbed pigtail, was a wonderful being, and productive of
endless amusement. You young folks don't remember the apple-girls
who used to follow the diligence up the hill beyond Boulogne, and the
delights of the jolly road? In making continental journeys with young
folks, an oldster may be very quiet, and, to outward appearance,
melancholy; but really he has gone back to the days of his youth, and
he is seventeen or eighteen years of age (as the case may be), and is
amusing himself with all his might. He is noting the horses as they come
squealing out of the post-house yard at midnight; he is enjoying the
delicious meals at Beauvais and Amiens, and quaffing ad libitum the rich
table-d'hote wine; he is hail-fellow with the conductor, and alive to
all the incidents of the road. A man can be alive in 1860 and 1830 at
the same time, don't you see? Bodily, I may be in 1860, inert, silent,
torpid; but in the spirit I am walking about in 1828, let us say;---in a
blue dress-coat and brass buttons, a sweet figured silk waistcoat (which
I button round a slim waist with perfect ease), looking at beautiful
beings with gigot sleeves and tea-tray hats under the golden chestnuts
of the Tuileries, or round the Place Vendome, where the drapeau blanc
is floating from the statueless column. Shall we go and dine
at "Bombarda's," near the "Hotel Breteuil," or at the "Cafe
Virginie?"--Away! "Bombarda's" and the "Hotel Breteuil" have been pulled
down ever so long. They knocked down the poor old Virginia Coffee-house
last year. My spirit goes and dines there. My body, perhaps, is seated
with ever so many people in a railway-carriage, and no wonder my
companions find me dull and silent. Have you read Mr. Dale Owen's
"Footfalls on th