I feel
as if I were enchanted or bewitched. It is barely eight o'clock
yet - it is nothing like half-past - when I have had my luggage
examined at that briskest of Custom-houses attached to the station,
and am rattling over the pavement in a hackney-cabriolet.
Surely, not the pavement of Paris? Yes, I think it is, too. I
don't know any other place where there are all these high houses,
all these haggard-looking wine shops, all these billiard tables,
all these stocking-makers with flat red or yellow legs of wood for
signboard, all these fuel shops with stacks of billets painted
outside, and real billets sawing in the gutter, all these dirty
corners of streets, all these cabinet pictures over dark doorways
representing discreet matrons nursing babies. And yet this morning
- I'll think of it in a warm-bath.
Very like a small room that I remember in the Chinese baths upon
the Boulevard, certainly; and, though I see it through the steam, I
think that I might swear to that peculiar hot-linen basket, like a
large wicker hour-glass. When can it have been that I left home?
When was it that I paid 'through to Paris' at London Bridge, and
discharged myself of all responsibility, except the preservation of
a voucher ruled into three divisions, of which the first was
snipped off at Folkestone, the second aboard the boat, and the
third taken at my journey's end? It seems to have been ages ago.
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