Of This Period Little
Could Be Employed At Tea, And We Were Not Otherwise Hungry; We Could
Give Something Of Our Interminable Leisure To Counting Our Baggage And
Suffering Unfounded Alarms At Failing To Make It Come Out Right, But We
Could Not Give Much.
The weather had turned chilly, the long station was full of draughts,
and the invalid of the party, without whom no American party is
perfectly national, was rapidly taking cold.
We were quite incredulous
when the examination actually began, but at last it really did, and it
began with our pieces, with such a show of favoring us on the
inspector's part, that when it was over, in about two minutes, one trunk
serving as a type of the innocence of all, I furtively held up a piece
of five francs in recognition of his kindness. But he slowly shook his
head, whether in regret or whether in stern refusal I shall never know.
He was an Italian, but in the employment of the French republic, and I
have not been able since to credit with certainty his incorruptibility
to his native or his adoptive country; I might easily be mistaken in
deciding either way.
What I am certain of, and certainly sorry for, is the superiority of the
French company's railway carriage, from Ventimiglia on, to the Italian
carriage which had brought us so far, and it is still with unwillingness
that I own the corporation's greater care for our comfort. If we had
been in the paternal care of the administration of the gambling-house.
at Monte Carlo, we could not have been more tenderly or cleanly
cushioned about, or borne away on softer springs; and very possibly a
measure of wickedness in the means is a condition of comfort in the end
to which we are so tempted to abandon ourselves in a world which is not
yet so sternly collectivist as I could wish.
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