with pride upon the royal mail coach dart over the king's highway.

"What a splendid road that was, Monsieur Tartarin, broad and well
kept, with its mile-stones, its little heaps of road-metal at regular
distances, and its pretty clumps of vines and olive-trees on either
hand! Then, again, the roadside inns so close together, and the
changes of horses every five minutes! And what jolly, honest chaps
my patrons were! -- village mayors and parish priests going up to
Nimes to see their prefect or bishop, taffety-weavers returning
openly from the Mazet, collegians out on holiday leave, peasants in
worked smock-frocks, all fresh shaven for the occasion that
morning; and up above, on the top, you gentlemen-sportsmen,
always in high spirits, and singing each your own family ballad to
the stars as you came back in the dark.

"Deary me! it's a change of times now! Lord knows what rubbish I
am carting here, come from nobody guesses where! They fill me
with small deer, these negroes, Bedouin Arabs, swashbucklers,
adventurers from every land, and ragged settlers who poison me
with their pipes, and all jabbering a language that the Tower of
Babel itself could make nothing of! And, furthermore, you should
see how they treat me -- I mean, how they never treat me: never a
brush or a wash. They begrudge me grease for my axles. Instead of
my good fat quiet horses of other days, little Arab ponies, with the
devil in their frames, who fight and bite, caper as they run like so
many goats, and break my splatterboard all to smithereens with
their lashing out behind. Ouch! ouch! there they are at it again!

"And such roads! Just here it is bearable, because we are near the
governmental headquarters; but out a bit there's nothing, Monsieur