information posted on the carriage, and been humbled in the dust? 

 “Oh,” he said, quite carelessly, “something about not leaving the train when it is in motion—zug, you know.”  

 “Pardon, mein Herr” (voice from the opposite side—what business had he to interfere?) “but the rule, when it has into English been translated, shall read———” and it turns out to be a warning not to stop the train without “plausible” reasons. Nothing is more disconcerting (and offensive) than to discover that the two imperturbable Germans in your carriage understand English perfectly, after you have been expressing your mind on German habits with that courtesy and freedom which are the prerogative of the Briton abroad. And can anything be more irritating and inexplicable than to find one's painfully accumulated store of foreign words ooze away in the crisis of travel, so that a respectable British matron, eager to be driven by the sea road at Cannes, is reduced to punching cocher in the small of the back with her parasol and shouting “eau de vie”—“and he drew up at a low public-house, as if we had been wanting a drink”—while her husband just escapes an apoplectic seizure, utilizing the remnants of three languages to explain his feelings as a Custom-house officer turns the contents of his portmanteau upside down. 

 It is not wise, however, for avaricious foreigners to trade upon our simplicity, for there is always a chance that they may catch a Tartar. Never have I seen a more ingenuous youth (in appearance) than one who travelled with me one night from Geneva to Paris. His unbroken ignorance of Continental ways, which opposed (successfully) the introduction of more than four persons into our second; his impenetrable stupidity, which at last saved him from the Customs; his unparalleled atrocities on the French language, seemed to precede him on the line and suggest opportunities of brigandage. They charged him eighteen francs for his supper at a place where we stopped for nearly twenty minutes, and would likely have appropriated the remaining two francs out of the Napoleon he offered, but the bell sounded, and he bolted, forgetting in his nervousness that he had not paid. The garçon followed, whom he failed to understand, and three officials could not make the matter plainer. When the public meeting outside our door reached its height there were present the station-master, seven minor officials, two gendarmes in great glory, a deputation of four persons from the buffet, an interpreter whose English was miraculous, and a fringe of loafers. Just as the police were about to do their duty our fellow passenger condescended on French—he 

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