Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 13.djvu/110

98 one has to spare: they are the only people I ever saw that were quite without a genius to be civil when they had a mind to be so. Will you eat? Will you play at cards? are literally the tip top well bred phrases in use. The French people we met, are quite of another turn, polite and easy; one is the natural consequence of the other, though a secret that few have discovered. I can bring you an Irish witness (if that be sufficient) that I have wished for you many times during this journey, particularly at Spa, where I imagined you might have been mending every day as fast as I did; and you are a base man to say, that any such impediment as you mentioned, thwarted your journey; for you were sure of a welcome share in every thing we had. It were unnecessary to say this now, if we had no thoughts of ever going again; but it is what I am strongly advised to though I should not much want it, and I am not averse: travelling agrees with me, and makes me good humoured. At home I am generally more nice than wise, but on the road nothing comes amiss. At Calais we were windbound four or five days, and I was very well contented: when the wind changed, I was delighted to go. As impatience is generally my reigning distemper, you may imagine how I must be alarmed at this sudden alteration, till I happily recollected two instances, where I was myself. The one at Breda, where the innkeeper let drop, "if you mean to go," an hour and half after we had told him fifty times, that we positively would go on. The other, at Amsterdam, where we met with a very incurious gentleman, who affirmed, there was nothing worth seeing; though, beside the town, which far surpassed my imagination, there happened to be a most