in big type, with a bigger margin, and embellished
with old-fashioned line-engravings, which
must have cost a deal of money. But I
could not read it. The Désobligeante, the
grisette, the Franciscan monk, and the little
French captain, had no longer any charms for
me. I preferred sitting in a huge arm-chair,
gazing idiotically upon an English waiter,
prematurely bald, and with a fringe of red
whisker, who came from Tooting, so he told
me, and didn't like Calais. The people had got
no 'art, he said. Calais, and the weather, and
the scarcity of travellers, had made him the
wretchedest of mankind. I speculated every
time he left the room on the chances of his
having gone out to hang himself.

If this state of things had threatened to
continue, say for two days longer, I must either have
gone back to Spain, or offered myself to a
recruiting officer as a substitute in the French army,
or killed somebody, or myself. Mercifully,
however, the boat which was to bring the person I
expected was due on Sunday night. The night-
mail usually arrives at about one A.M. How
I counted the minutes from dinner-time to mid-
night; and how all the minutes seemed hours,
the half-hours years, and the hours ages! I
dallied with the fried sole at dinner, and I
made an anatomical examination of the head
of that fish. Did you ever dissect a fried
sole's head? The study is a very curious
one. I did my best to engage the melancholy
waiter in conversation, but could get
nothing out of him beyond a repetition of the
statement that he was a native of Tooting, and
that the people of Calais had no 'art. I made
another dive into the Sentimental Journey, but
it was a failure, and even the scene at the opera
with the dwarf who threatens to cut the
German's queue off, failed to make me laugh. I went
out into the corridor, and read the framed and
glazed advertisements on the walls, till I fell
into a chaotic frame of mind, and became
imbued with the persuasion that Bully's toilet-
vinegar was made at the Schweizerhof Hotel,
Lucerne, and that the steamers of the
Messageries Impériales ran on Tuesdays and
Thursdays from the carpet manufactory of M.
Sallandrouge de Lamornaia to Mr. Medwin, boot-
maker (by appointment) to the late Prince
Consort.

I hobbled out to a café in the Grande Rue, if
that be the name of a long narrow street full of
thorough draughts, which runs from the gap where
there is the statue, towards the suburb of St.
Pierre-les-Calais. The steam of wet umbrellas,
the odour of absinthe, and the clicking of
dominoes, very soon drove me out again. I went
back to Dessein's and took a carriage, and drove
down to the port — it was now about eleven—
to wait there till the steamer came in.

The night was a very stormy one, and the
boat was not true to her time. As I sat
selfishly smoking inside, the driver put his
head in at the window and suggested that it
was exceedingly cold, and that his horse was
slightly inclined to inflammation of the chest.
Could I not alight somewhere and wait till the
boat came in? I was nothing Ioth; but where
was I to wait? All the little cabarets about the
port were closed, and the Calais railway terminus
is outside the town gates. The driver suggested
that his mother's cousin was a waiter at the
terminus buffet, enjoying the confidence of his
chiefs, as most French employés do; and
although that establishment was not open to the
public before the steamer was in, I could
doubtless obtain admission at a side-door and
refresh myself with coffee until the "paquebot
Anglais" was signalled as coming into
harbour. I very gladly acceded to this arrangement,
for even Monsieur Dessein's silk squabs
were beginning to feel chilly, and, after some
parley at the side-door, and the assurance on
the part of my guide to the janitor within that
I was a person of the highest consideration, a
chain was loosened, sundry bars were undrawn,
and I gained ingress to that well-remembered
salle à manger of the Calais buffet where I had
so often swallowed a hasty supper. The waiter
enjoying the confidence of his chiefs had risen
to let me in, from a flock bed, apparently
supported on two pairs of colossal scissors
outstretched. He had a white nightcap on, which,
combined with his white necktie and other
waiterial appurtenances, gave him an
inconceivably droll and pantomimic appearance. He
yawned as fearfully as M. L'Eveillé in the
Barber of Seville, and, so soon as he had
admitted me, went to bed again. To reach the
buffet I had to cross a portion of the station.
Everything was asleep. Everything seemed
dead. The paquebot Anglais was not yet
signalled, and until that warning was given she
might not have been due — so far as the Calais
station was concerned — until the Greek
Kalends.

Railway coffee, I suppose, knows no rest, but
is always simmering, like a witches' caldron.
Another waiter, whom I found meriting the
confidence of his chiefs by sleeping under the counter
of the buffet, brought me a demie tasse, and I
sat down by the great fire at the top of the
room, and warmed myself. The gas was all
turned down to the very lowest pitch at which
it would burn — the pitch at which apothecaries
keep it to serve as a taper, when they wish to
seal their nice little packets of nasty things.
The room was full of conflicting shadows,
intersecting each other at all sorts of angles, until
they danced off at last into corners and merged
into one deep shade. The snowy tablecloths
looked very ghostly in their long perspective.
The red firelight winked lazily in the cut glass
and cutlery and electro-plate. The air was
laden with a soft and drowsy sound, as of a
trombone played under a feather-bed, which I
fancied proceeded from the entire railway staff
of the Calais railway station, all meriting the
confidence of their chiefs, and snoring in unison.
A great Angora cat, majestic, grey, bewigged
and tippeted, and the very image of the late Lord
Chief Justice Denman, was lying on the chair
by the fireside opposite me. The creature