CORRESPONDENCE.
A LAZY JOURNEY.—II.
ABOUT sea-sickness, I think, there is nothing new or pleasant to be said. And if we would only believe that, unless our words be either new or pleasant it were better not to say or write them, what a much better world it would be, and how fax fewer the articles necessary to be read by that depressing pro- duct of civilisation, the well-informed person, in the " Nihilist," in the "Monthly Hypochondriac," or the " Spirit of the Age 1" I have always myself treated sea-sickness as a very serious evil,. and dreading it in the prospect most exceedingly, refrain from all light words on the subject. Hence I am rarely, if ever, ill at sea. Mrs. Balbus, with the light heart of womankind, which, in spite of rights and education, I pray may be theirs for ever,. laughs at it (and at me) beforehand, and suffers much upon the slightest provocation of the waves. My excellent father,. Mr. Balbus, lived out his days under the impression that he was an accomplished sailor, ruminated for the first third of the voyage, absconded for the second, and towards the end would. come to me cheerfully, " Most extraordinary thing, my boy, and with me unexampled; I have been very ill indeed !" The voyage to Harbour-of-Grace is not a pleasant one ; these half-and-half migrations are not. Either make the shortest passage you can,. and get it over in a couple of hours, or commit yourself hope- fully to a sea life, and sail for ten days. In the last case, you make up your mind to it ; in the other, you have nothing much to which to make up your mind. But to spend ten or twelve hours in that pestilent combination of sights and smells, always looking at your watch to see how much has been done, and what remains to do ; veering from the bridge to the deck, and the deck to the cabin, wishing that the machinery would either stop or quicken ; trying to read, and failing ; trying to talk cheer. fully, and finding that repartee withers on the tongue ; realising„ in fact, that think you cannot, except about the waves and the chances for or against illness,—a sea-passage of this kind is the very essence of boredom. How the captains and the stewards escape a series of suicides is a much more bewildering problem to me than Boz's post-boy. Nor do I hold that my many-initialled but incorporate friend L.S.W.R_ makes things as pleasant as they might be. He is the owner of many trains and steamboats, in which I am fain to believe that he travels very little himself. He profits much in the Mammon-way, I am told, and is apt to add to his four letters the magic formula of M.P., and to inhabit Babylon and the country alternately in much comfort, steadily and effectually resisting, from his silent place in St. Stephen's, all invasion of his despotic rights. He is a " Grumble-Island interest," of the rockiest kind ; and it is safer, for election purposes, to attack the King of the Boomerangs. Mrs. Balbus and I have no right to complain, I suppose, because we should have reached Harbour- of-Grace by half-after-eight in the morning, and did not reach it much before twelve, though the weather (prophets allowed for) was very favourable, on the whole. "You see," quoth the steward, loyal as always, "this is quite the longest passage we have had since I have been on the line." " It always is," I answered; "and why so P" "Well, the wind is crossways, and that's heavy on the one paddle." " Doubtless," I said, " but the wind is often crossways." " Well,—it is." Nor did I get much further. L.S.W.R., of course, as his manner is, put asunder,. what had been divinely joined together, and relegated Mrs. Balbus to the ladies' cabin, an apartment always one-fourth of the size of the gentlemen's, and expected to contain, from the weaker attributes of the sex, four times as many. L.S.W.R, is, as votes thus far go, male. They confined Mrs. Balbus in a berth which, from her account, must have been like one of those cages in the Bastille constructed to the equal exclusion of sitting and lying down, with the additional charm of rounding a comer, a refinement of torture which had escaped the invention of the Rois Jadis. She was really ill and in pain for some days after landing, and lost much of the early pleasure of her holiday from cramp. Said I to Mother Setebos, the stewardess, " This is hardly right, as we pay L.S.W.R. to make us comfortable." "Well," she answered, "it is a poor sort of berth. But this is an old ship, and the good ones are repairing." " Doubtless," I said, "but they often must be." " Well, they are."
Like a true Grumble-Islander, I have poured out my grievances —albeit neither pleasant nor new—and we are sea-locked, Mrs.
Balbus and I, at the fair-named city of Harbour-of-Grace. I am not writing a " Guide," and do not wish to say much of our travels from the hotel point of view. But if a traveller to Harbour-of-Grace should be tempted to find a rest for his feet at the Louvre Hotel, which faces the port in tempting nearness, let him think better of it, say the Eighth Commandment under his breath, and pass by on the other side. The landlord, a gentleman with a false air of bonhomie, exacted from Mrs. Balbus and myself the sum of eighteen francs (without wine) for our breakfast after we landed, on two or three dishes of the simplest fare. But there was a stroke of genius in his bill, for which I almost forgave him. He described our very plain and sauceless steak as a " bifteic k la Chitteaubriand," the luxurious dainty for which, if I am not mistaken, the three brothers of Provence were so famous in the bygone days. When I looked, some days afterwards, on the sea-washed grave of the poet of the Outre- Tombe, I found myself reflecting, with Hamlet, on the base uses to which our names may turn. He had an old and decorated father-in-law, had the landlord, who looked so noble and im- posing, that I thought be had won his ribbon on the field of honour, and hesitated to sit clown in the same room with him. But in the present days of Terre-folle, these tokens are won in many and strange ways, and I am disposed to think that old M. Blasius's chief claim upon his country was having sold much chocolate at double its worth. The third and last of the Vendetta race (for I cannot believe in the Plon-Plon dynasty) has fallen among the Boomerangs, and been buried, poor boy ! amongst one of the most amazing outbursts of national snob- hood to which even a Miinthausen Government has ever given birth ; and the insignia of their Legion of Honour shine on the breasts of the trades-folk—the stock-jobbers—anywhere and everywhere, as befits days when men bow down more and more in the House of Mammon, and are apt to forget in what clear and uncompromising terms the final results of our bargains with him have been set before us. There is wrath in some circles of Belle-Etoile, and jubilation in others, because it is now proposed to bestow the Legion upon the well- graced players of the Theatre of All-the-Talents. Why not P Their triumphs do not injure mankind as those of the great Shoddy tribe do ; and surely if any class in Terre-folle have " avenged " the great battle, it is their actors and drama- tists, who take all the money out of the pockets of their poor island brethren, and, instead of our sound, wholesome fare, pamper us on what their own famous critic, L6loup, writing in the witty journal, the Barbie? de Seville, calls, " l'art le plus parfaitemeut grossier qui sit jamais surgi chez un peuple." But our managers here in Grumble Island find, or think they find, that this is the best road to Mammon's heart ; and the critics, indulging in an opposite view of the dramatic decadence of Terre-folk, love to have it so. " Dorothy," said I, after we had been talking over these matters with the " Barbier " and the black coffee, "I have loved the drama and written plays in my time ; but I doubt if the stage in Grumble Island is a field for any writer troubled with self-respect or intelligence." " Tom, dear," she answered, " I perfectly agree with you." And so she would, I am sure, if I had said that there was nothing worth -writing but plays.
There is nothing, however, so remarkable as the quiet way in which a woman carries her point when so inclined, till one wonders afterwards how she has done it, after agreeing to all the stronger half says. We had taken our fill of the first plea- sures of the first foreign town, had wandered about its markets, and looked into its shop-windows, of which I—poor, blind bachelor that I had been !—was to learn the charms for the first time, with a certain hidden struggle to keep outside. We had delighted in the white caps of Ciderland, and the bonny faces of its maids, driven out to the great Phare blinking island- -wards, and suggesting the Little Corporal," chafing on his Channel-bound cliff,—" Thus far shalt thou go, but this way, at least, no further, even thou,"—and ended the evening with the delights of an Alcazar—which has a seemlier sound than a music- hall, but is just the same thing—the touch of modern Nature which makes all the 'Arrios kin. We had seen the same strangely- constructed maidens, whose arms are so thin and legs so stout, that there is no believing that both are real; and listened to the last comic song—nearly all chorus—in the Terre-follese most nearly corresponding with " fol-de-rol-lol." And Mrs. Balbus now suggested a migration to the fashionable haunt of Trouvi- lain, a suggestion of which I fondly thought that I had finally disposed with her full concurrence. I had explained to her that our best plan was to take boat direct for the old city of Ville- enx-Abbayes, and to study church architecture in the Norman and the Gothic, Trouvilain being dullness incarnate, and a waste of time. She had consented, with some hesitations about the boat, L.S.W.R. having shaken her confidence in herself; still she had consented, meekly but fully. Now, without further prelude, and with a sweet, feminine ignoring of all previous discussion or plan, she said, " Please, dear, I should like to go to Trouvilain." And of course we went.
I suppose that it is from some inherent deficiency in my nature, that Fashion so flattens the mercury in my thermo- meter. Very true would the remark of the Fleet-Street sage about green fields have been, in my creed, if he had made it of the haunts and replicas of Fashion. " Sir, he who has seen one, has seen them all." Character and personality wither in their silks and satins, till the observer's wearied face is outbored only by their own. Why, in the middle of the bright coasts and land- scapes which make the Ciderlands a paradise, Fashion should have fixed on such an eyesore as Trouvilain for her local capital, only fashion knows. I hope that it was from a modest fear, on the part of Art, to enter into competition with Nature. A dirty and common- place fishing village, with a row of modern Terre-follese mansions (two wings and a centre, with a turret in ambitious cases) added on, like a mud cabin faced with stucco ; a dirty and inconvenient port, begirt with unsightly hovels ; a long stretch of sand— not firm and silver-specked, and elastic to the tread, like so much of the neighbouring coasts, but flabby and uninviting, with half-a-mile of wooden plank laid down for Fashion to take her walks abroad upon, and a glaring sun—on the few occasions now-a-days when he condescends to set the soul an example, according to the hymn, by running his daily stage of duty, instead of shirking it and pleading loss of spots—to boil the whole into broth ; such is Trouvilain, as far as I know it. Eliminate from its attractions the entire element of visitors, as the weather clerk has so far clone, to much wringing of the hands of the sea-side sharks, and the horrors of the cenotaph of Fashion mock description. I wonder if the present amisemirabitia has been sent to teach the sharks that Eighth Commandment P Terre-folle is guiltless of the Hokee Pokee and Boomerang wars; and Grumble Island is innocent of the blood of the Jesuits, for doth not the Marquess of Longbow still hold office therein ? But the sharks, like the 'Arries, are cosmopolitan. The table d'hOte dinner of the Hotel du Regain took place in a deserted banquet-hall, whose garlands were dead. Mrs. Balbus and I were the only guests. The commissionary of the hotel was the only waiter. A pigeon and a cabbage were the only dinner. The phantom-waiter, having once spent a week in our island, insisted upon airing our tongue. He owned that the meal was bad, but begged us to wait for breakfast. That was hard, for we wanted dinner. But it was Friday, and the desolate mansion was doing meagre, for propitiation. 1 once argued with a Terre- follese lady about the folly of her Friday system, and she an. swered me quietly, " Et vOtre Dimanche, done P"—whereupon I bold my tongue. In Booth, the law of the Seventh Day is as wholesome as it is divine. We islanders barter so much for six days of the week, that on the seventh we are the better for shop-shutting. The Terre-follese eat so much, that it is well for them to fast. And so the whirligig of Time brings in its revenges. We shook the sand off our feet on Trouvilain, and
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