Payne—to know where they are until the wheels bump into them. Sometimes one of our wheels would drop in, sometimes all four. You may imagine the strain of this sort of work upon the tyres, frame, and springs. But in a whole day's run of a hundred and thirty miles we punctured only one tyre, which I mended in fifteen minutes.
Béziers, seen from a distance, set strikingly upon a hill, looked an imposing town, but turned out to be an ordinary and dirty place when we came to ascend its long, winding streets. Beyond, we ran for a while along the edge of a great lagoon, and knew, though we could not see it, that the Mediterranean lay close at our right hand.
At Montpellier we did not stop, and I delivered no lecture on the subject of the gorgeous, all-conquering Duchess, as I might have been tempted to do if we'd had no addition to our party. It's a large, bright, and stately town, very liveable-looking; but nothing was said about lingering, though there are some things worth seeing. We had an impressive entrance into the ancient city of Nîmes, running in by early moonlight, across a great, open plain, under a spacious, purpling dome of sky, the sun dying in carmine behind us, the evening star a big, flashing diamond in the moon-paled east. The old Roman amphitheatre stood up darkly and nobly in the silver twilight; but we passed on to our hotel, the programme evidently being to satisfy the senses at the expense of the soul. They do one very well at the hotel in Nîmes, but I looked forward hopefully to a request to play courier among the sights of the dear
