Page:The Overland Monthly, volume 1, issue 1.djvu/12

 about overcharging, no grumbling about anything.

But the happiest regulation in French railway government, is—twenty minutes to dinner! No five-minutes boltings of flabby rolls, muddy coffee, questionable eggs, gutta-percha beef, and pies whose conception and execution are a dark and bloody mystery to all save the cook that created them! No; we sat calmly down—it was in old Dijon, which is so easy to spell and so impossible to pronounce—and poured our rich Burgundian wines and munched calmly through a long table d' hote bill of fare, snailpatties, delicious fruits and all; then paid the trifle it cost and stepped happily aboard the train again, without once cursing the railroad company! A rare experience, and one to be treasured forever!

They say they do not have accidents on these French roads, and I think it must be true. If I remember rightly, we passed high above wagon roads, or through tunnels under them, but never crossed them on their own level. About every quarter of a mile, it seemed to me,a man came out and held up a club till the train went by, to signify that everything was safe ahead. Switches were changed a mile in advance, by pulling a wire rope that passed along the ground by the rail, from station to station. Signals for the day and signals for the night gave constant and timely notice of the position of the switches.

No, they have no railroad accidents to speak of, in France. But why? Because when one occurs, somebody has to hang for it! Not hang, may be, but be punished with such vigor of emphasis as to make negligence a thing to be shuddered at by railroad officials for many a day thereafter. "No blame attached to the officers "—that lying and disaster-breeding verdict so common to our soft-hearted juries—is seldom rendered in France. If the trouble occurred in the conductor's department, that officer must suffer if his subordinates cannot be proven guilty; if in the engineer's department, and the case be similar, the engineer must answer. The old travelers—those delightful parrots who have "been here before," and know more about the country than Louis Napoleon knows now or ever will know— tell us these things, and we believe them because they are pleasant things to believe, and because they are plausible and savor of the rigid subjection to law and order which we behold about us everywhere.

Meanwhile we are getting foreignized rapidly and with facility. We are getting reconciled to halls and bedchambers with unhomelike stone floors and no carpets—floors that ring to the tread of one's heels with a sharpness that is death to sentimental musing. We are getting used to tidy, noiseless waiters, who glide hither and thither, and hover about your back and your elbows like butterflies, quick to comprehend orders, quick to fill them, thankful for a gratuity, without regard to the amount, and always polite—never otherwise than polite. That is the strangest curiosity yet—a really polite hotel waiter who isn't an idiot. We are getting used to driving right into the central court of the hotel, in the midst of a fragrant circle of vines and flowers, and in the midst also of parties of gentlemen sitting quietly reading the paper and smoking. We are getting used to ice frozen by artificial process in ordinary bottles —the only kind of ice they have here. We are getting used to all these things, but we are wot getting used to carrying our own soap. We were sufficiently civilized to carry our own combs and tooth-brushes, but this thing of having to ring for soap every time we wash is new to us, and not pleasant at all. We think of it just after we get our heads and faces thoroughly wet, or just when we think we have been in the bath-tub long enough, and then of course