my luggage. The omnibus does not take
luggage; but a ticket porter does, and charges
a franc for each article; I pay it, and get
a good deal of incivility into the bargain.
Capital boat again. We must be paddling
along at nearly fifteen miles an hour.
Breakfast good, too, and only cost three francs,
including wine, coffee, liqueur, and dessert.
Half-a-crown for what in England should
cost two shillings.

That abominable mistral, or north west
wind, is blowing: it began after we made
the last bend in the river before reaching
Avignon, and I can hardly keep my legs
against it. I have a cold in the head all
at once; and my skin feels like parchment
dried by magic.

Avignon! and I solemnly assure you
that the whole population of that ancient
papal residence appeared to me to be a set
of drunken extortioners. There was no
order or arrangement of any kind about our
luggage, and I had a hard fight to get mine.
At length, however, I succeeded, and placing
it under the care of a powerful fellowaz`—quite
drunk, but the soberest I saw asked him to
carry it to the Bureau des Omnibus. He
assured me that he would carry it anywhere
—to Africa, if it pleased me—and away we
went together. The scene of rowing, and
fighting, and scrambling on that road was as
bad as it could ever have been at Donnybrook
Fair. The porters seemed to be a regular
organised gang of banditti (speaking no French,
by the way), who look upon travellers as prey,
and the seizure of their luggage as one of the
fundamental rights and privileges of their
order. They catch it up, a box at a time, let
it belong to whom it may, and off they march
with it, of course in the wrong direction.
Before you can get it back, you must submit
to many curses, immoderate shouting and
bellowing from a crowd of fellows hopelessly
drunk who gather round you, and pay what
is asked of you. There is no escape except
fighting, and I learn that regular pitched
battles with travellers are by no means
uncommon; not stand-up fistycuff fights,
but kicking in the stomach and knife-drawing.
Every person I met in the town
was afraid of these fellows, from the omnibus
cad and a friend of his (both hopelessly drunk,
and smelling intolerably of garlic, who got in
and sat down on each side of me in the
omnibus), to the hotel-keeper, as noisy, drunken,
and shouting as the rest of them. Even the
police dare not interfere.

Through the same oven of a waiting-room,
annoyed by the same ridiculous regulations,
the same incivility, and the same extortions,
I reach my hotel at Marseilles at half-past ten
in the evening. I am obliged to go by the
omnibus, because there are no fiacres or other
carriages; I see my luggage tossed about as
if there was nothing but wool in it, and
flinging from any height could not hurt it. I
am deafened by a party of jovial commercial
gents teasing a resolute stout lady, who got
into the omnibus puffing and struggling, and
having squeezed a meek English clergyman
out of his seat, announced her opinion that
liberality well understood began at home, and
forthwith wrangled with the cad about her
fare. Every individual in the omnibus, save
the clergyman and I, took part for or against
her, and all talked at once as loud as they
could bawl.

There is nobody to take my luggage at the
hotel, or who appears to expect the omnibus,
or to care a straw about anything or anybody,
or who knows if I can have a room or where;
but at length these questions are decided, and
eleven o'clock seats me before a fire in my
bed-room, with the bell-rope in my hand.

I ring. Can I have a pair of slippers?—No;
the hotel does not furnish them.—Can I have
some tea?—Not easily; everybody went to
bed immediately the omnibus came in (at halfpast
ten).—Well! nevermind. I feel you have
the mistral blowing here, my friend the
night-porter.—Yes, monsieur, slightly. Slightly ?
—Oh yes, very slightly; when it blows hard it
takes the skin of your face right off.—And
how long is it likely to last ?—About six
weeks: bon soir, monsieur. His time is
precious. He is off.

I mention these things, trifling as they
are in themselves, because I am staying
at the first hotel in the place, where I
know beforehand that my expenses will be
thirty or forty francs a day, and also because
I wish to shew that every arrangement is
equally badly managed at present on the
Marseilles route;—every one, from the
primary considerations of safety, speed, and
economy down to the minor ones of comfort,
civility, and attention. I remember arriving
at this same hotel from Algiers, and thinking
it a species of paradise, as indeed it is to
anything out there; a circumstance to which
many seaport hotels owe their celebrity. On
passing through here, however, from the other
side, I maintain a different opinion.

It is afternoon. The mistral has ceased in
spite of the waiter's prophecy, and the same
soft silent rain is always falling, noiselessly,
solemnly. It is a fearful thing this rain, falling
so constantly that for six weeks we have
hardly had a day's respite. Great floods are
out in the country, and the corn lands and the
vineyards lie under water for miles and miles.
Sick women and tender children are dying in
their damp homes in far away villages, the
principal streets of which are not fordable
with safety. And the water saps the mud
foundations of peasants' houses and washes
them away, so that they fall with a dull heavy
sound, killing nobody, for they have been
abandoned. The harvest they say is spoilt, and
the young vine-trees, literally drowned, lay
with their roots rotting in the water. We
hear strange tales of men meeting their death
by drowning upon by-roads which they had
trodden in safety for years, and in meadows