Time, Vol. 6 (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from Time, Vol. 6 [The facts of the following narrative were given to me by a young Englishman in Paris, and I have endeavoured to relate them in his own words. The story is not an imaginary one.] I shall be careful how I make the acquaintance of pleasant strangers in travelling, after the adventure which occurred to me this year in France. I am a London merchant, but my visit to Paris was not connected with business. I simply went over for a week's holiday at Easter time. Stepping into the morning mail train at Charing Cross, I found myself in a first-class carriage with three travelling companions, two gentlemen and a lady, who was extremely pretty and seemed to be the wife of the younger and handsomer of the two men. The train had scarcely started when the lady wanted a penknife to cut the string of a parcel. Her companions searched their pockets but had not got such a thing: so I lent mine, and this led to our conversing on very friendly terms for the rest of the journey. Everybody knows how much a journey is shortened by agreeable company, and these companions of mine were as amiable, intelligent, and talkative as one could desire. They spoke good English, with a foreign accent which I believed to be French, for I am not enough of a linguist to detect the different tones of foreign pronunciation. By-and-bye they stated that they were French and lived at Marseilles. The younger man, who was tall and fair-haired with a light, waxed moustache, said that he was a civil engineer. His age appeared to be twenty-five. The other, whom he mentioned as his wife's brother, was a few years older, he wore a dark beard and described himself as a physician. They had been to England, as I understood, on some sanitary mission connected with drainage, and spoke with lively gratification of the pleasant month they had spent there. Their praise of our country and its people was just of the kind which it is most flattering to an Englishman to hear, and I was greatly struck by the shrewdness with which they had studied our institutions and manners, making observations at once amusing and novel but always to our advantage. The lady had been delighted with English scenery, the cleanliness of houses, the fresh, healthy looks of our peasantry, the luxury of some of our theatres, and the beauty of our girls everywhere. We had a quick passage to Calais, but the sea was a little rough, so I was the only one of our party who remained on deck. I met my new friends again in the refreshment room at Calais and heard good humoured accounts of how they had suffered from that horrid mal de mer. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.