All night long the train speeds towards the
south. We leave Sens with its grey cathedral solemnly towering in
the moonlight a mile on the left. (How few remember, that to the
architect William of Sens we owe Canterbury Cathedral.)
Fontainebleau is on the right, station after station wakes up our
dozing senses, while ever in our ears are ringing as through the dim
light we gaze on the surrounding country, "the pastures of
Switzerland and the poplar valleys of France."
It is still dark--as dark, that is, as the midsummer night will
allow it to be, when we are aware that we have entered on a tunnel;
a long tunnel, very long--I fancy there must be high hills above it;
for I remember that some few years ago when I was travelling up from
Marseilles to Paris in midwinter, all the way from Avignon (between
which place and Chalon the railway was not completed), there had
been a dense frozen fog; on neither hand could anything beyond the
road be descried, while every bush and tree was coated with a thick
and steadily increasing fringe of silver hoar-frost, for the night
and day, and half-day that it took us to reach this tunnel, all was
the same--bitter cold dense fog and ever silently increasing hoar-
frost: but on emerging from it, the whole scene was completely
changed; the air was clear, the sun shining brightly, no hoar-frost
and only a few patches of fast melting snow, everything in fact
betokening a thaw of some days' duration.
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