WINTER FLITTINGS.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VI, Issue 120, 23 May 1871, Page 2

WINTER FLITTINGS.

CFrom the Saturday Review, February 4th.) No doubt the war has given a new zrst this year to "Sittings. The route through Paris to Marseilles has become lo inevitable a prelude to either Italy or the East that the mere effort, to avoid it brings home to us the reality of the great struggle. The war is no more a mere , item in tbe Times when we disentomb ' our forgotten passports and find ourselves lords of the empty saloon. The little run across French territory from Calais to Brussels or Geneva to Lyons assumes the charm of an adventure. The very look of Calais, the desolate hotels,- the silent streets, the lonely quay, where the very fishwomen have to curse (themselves into liveliness, brings home the great battle of the nations to us as no Correspondent's letter can do. It is odd to remember how in earlier days we envied our fathers, stirred, as we fancied, to higher energy than we by the greatness of tha Napoleonic struggle iv which they moved. But in the very presence of events before which Austerlitz and Borodino shrivel into insignificance, it is difficult to detect any moral elevation among lhe victims of our winter flittings. The railway director who shares our coupe shakes his head over the terrible interruption to business. A young 'exquisite deplores the bother of passports, and hints that a war is " no end of a good thing for the newspapers." Our own thoughts dwell with a fatal persistence on the weary detour along the Rhine which it has substituted for the easy run through Marseilles. The train rolls on with such a belligerent independence of time-tables that even the Continental Bradshaw turns cut to be occasionally right. Still, tedious as war makes the wiuter flitting, it brings picturesque compensation along with it. It is not easy to forget the sight of such a place as Lille — the lines of felled poplars along every road, aud mud forts rising on the heights, the rows of empty houses doomed at the approach of a besieger, the groups of Moblots in its streets, weak sappy boys for the most part, gazing through shop-windows at encouraging pictures of the " Massacre of Sedan." Brussels is crammed with refugees, as listless and aimless as those we left in Eegent-street. Torches! are flaring at each station along the Rhine over grou ps of soldiers packirjg munitions^ the night; troop traius roll by full of spectacled Laudwehr ; iuundatious of "officers flood the hotels of Cologne and condemn luckless voyagers to a night's rest on the boards, j Behind, too, lies the terrible backgroix jA of war. Hospital trains, waiting at^ sidings, give one glimpses of pale /aces, and bandaged; heads and arms in fyhile slings. Waiters in the refreshment-room hover iv kindly German fashion round a boy-voluuteer brought back wouuded from the front, and women bend as they pass with words of comfort over the worn young face. Prisoners, too, pass us, ragged, dogged, and unshorn. " What barbarians," we exclaimed, as we saw tbe photograph of the Turco prisoners in their camp at Mainz. "The Bavarians are worse barbarians than the Turcos," replied the Rhinelander to whom we spoke. It may be that the war has- only hushed for a time the jealousies that sever German from German; but it has called out in all a spirit of resolute endurance of which one catches glimpses in the quiet For remainder of news see fourth page.

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orderly civilian-looking soldiers that throng every platform; There was a certain stolid grandeur of soul in the shopkeeper whom we asked " Why is^there no illumination for the surrender of Metz?" "We are waiting," was the quiet reply, " for the surreuder of Paris." But perhaps, after all, the pleasantest form of winter flittiog is that of flitting by sea, and getting rid of war aud rumours of war altogether. Justice has hardly yet been done to a life on board a packet. Nothing is so hostile to social existence as a railway compartment ; nothing so favorable to it as the deck of a steamship. Everybody is wholly dependent on everybody else. There is no library to shelter one from boredom ; no change in the day's walk save from poop to bow and from bow back again to poop ; no refuge in letters, or chance of getting a table to stand still for a moment while one writes ; no dinner save in common. There is community j even in sea-sickness. Under such a disci- j pline as this bears are tamed, and the shiest fellows " brought out" very rapidly indeed. Everybody knows everybody else in forty-oight hours ; . at a week's end enmities are declared, eternal friendships vowed, flirtations fairly under wa^pM life thoroughly developed around 'ne. There is all tbe vanity of a club without its stiff isolation ; there are buttercups of whom everything is "fun," who take you into their confidence in five minutes, and leave you in five minutes more with the discovery that they have nothing to confide; Calvinistic Scotch couples, who ponder over their ailments, and " prefer to make no acquaintance ; " parsons very much on the loose; prim English matrons; and Yankee giris of a very unprim type indeed. The Yankee girl was born to live in packets. She gives one the notion of a being created to rush through space. She is always on the move; last year in Paris, the year before in Sau Francisco; she has taken a run back to New York on her way to Cairo ; you meet her on the Pyramids, you flirt with her in the Sierra Morena, you jostle her in the studios of Rome, and you cut her in the Tuileries Gardens. She is equally foud of supper and sentiment ; and breaks into one's morning rhapsody over the sunrise to spout out an order for a hard-boiled egg, and two slices of ham " cut lean." She is silent when her mouth is full, and that is fortunately pretty often. But a great deal of her conversation when it is empty refers to the pleasantest modes of filling it. She is great on tables d'hote and critical oh hotels. Her pocket-book is full of charming recipes for dishes she has met with, mixed up oddly with descriptions of Rome and the names of her dancing partners. She delights in telling you how rich "pa" is and how vulgar "ma "is. " I'm a Yankee gal, I guess, and ma keeps pretty slick out of my way." Life takes a free and easy turn in this absence of maternal supervision. For a certain noisy kind of flirting nobody is the Yankee girl's equal. To do her justice she does not mix with it the slightest tinge of romance or poetry. She has, in fact, a great horror and contempt for all the higher and more poetic sides of humau sentiment. She likes to amuse and be amused, but she hates " nonsense." She never saw you before, and she never cares ' to see you again, but while you are there she will laugh with you, chat with you, tell you her secrets, swear a constant fidelity, and give you a lock of her hair. It is difficult to say whether she is married or not ; if she is, it does not matter much, for her husband is as often without her as with her. "I love my husband," she tells you plumply; "oh yes ; I love my husband, and a good many other people besides ! " And then shfe goes down to supper again, and sentiment ia forgotten in sherry-cobbler. Altogether, if one is an Englishman, an infusion of Americans makes packet-life agreeable enough. Yankees have a perfect mania for " knowing" English people, and the stiffness with which their advances aro,. usually received lies at the root of many a stumporator's declamation on Independence Day. But there is no reason— should one travel alone — for giving occasion in. this way to international resentments. An American girl ranks among the number of those agreeable acquaintances without whom life would be grey and colourless, and whom there is no need to introduce to one's wife. But she certainly gives immense fun and vivacity to a flitting by sea. It is odd, when one is safely anchored in a winter retreat, to look back at the terrors and reluctance with which one faced the sentence of exile. Even if sunshine were the only gain of a- winter flitting, it would still be hard to estimate the gain. The cold winds of Roirie, the icy showers of the Bavarian plain, the fogs of Innsprack, give perhaps a zest not wholly its own to Italian sunshine. But *he abrupt plunge down the Brenner into a land of warmth and color sends a strange shock or pleasure through every ' nerve} •-The flinging off of wps pd * UM > *M i

"- ■ •••. tit ' ' ■A > discarding of greatcoats/'-' is like the beginning of a new life. It is not till we pass in this sharp, abrupt fashion from the November of one side the Alps to the November of the other that we 'get some notion of the way in which the actual range and freedom of life is cramped by the chill *' north- easrers," \ ( in which Mr. Kingsley revels. The unchanged vegetation, thh background of dark olive woods, the masses of ilex, the golden globes of the orange hanging over the garden-wall, are all so many distinct gains to the eye which has associated winter with leafless boughs and a bare landscape. One has almost a boyish delight in plucking roses at Christmas or hunting for violets along: the hedges on New Year's Day. There are chill days of course, and chiller nights, but cold is a relative term and loses its English meaning io spots where'snow falls once in the year . and vanishes before midday. The mere break of habit is delightful; it is like a laughing defiance of established facts to louDge by the seashore in the hot sun-glare of a January morning. Aud with this new sense of liberty comes also a freedom from the overpowering dread of chills and colds aud coughs, which only invalids can appreciate. It is an indescribable relief not to look for a cold round every corner. The " loungiug " which becomes one's life i along the Riviera'or the Bay of Sorrento is only another name for the ease and absence of anxiety which the presence of j coustant sunshine gives to life. Few ! people really "lounge" less thaa tbe j English exiles who bask in the sun of I Italy. Their real 'danger lies in the perpetual temptation to over-exertion which arises from the sense of renewed health. Every village on its hill-top, every white shrine glistening high up , among the olives, seems to woo one up the stony paths and the long hot climb to the summit. The relief from home itself, the break away from all the routine of one's life, is hardly less than the relief I from greatcoats. It is not till our life- is thoroughly disorganised, till the grave father of a family finds himself perched on a donkey, or tbe habitue of Pall Mall sees himself sauntering alone through' the olive groves, that/'oneVealises the iron hounds within which our English existence moves. Every holiday, of course, brings this home to one more or less, but the long holiday of a whole winter brings it home most of all. England and English ways recede and become unreal. Old prepossessions and prejudices lose half their force when sea and mountains part us from their native soil. It is impossible to keep up our vivid iuterest in the politics of Little Pedlington, or to maintain our wild excitement over the matrimonial fortunes of Miss Garrett. The spasmodic arrival of the diligence, the utter uncertainty as to the delivery of papers, weans one at last from one's dependence on the Times. It becomes possible to breakfast without; the last telejrram, and to go to bed without the news of a fresh butchery. One's real interest lies in the sunshine, in the pleasure of having sunshine to-day, in the hope of having sunshine to-morrow. It is not that one is free from England, for England is round one wherever one goes; but it is a roving, hile England, a great gipsy world of Englishmen and Englishwomen with colonies in every nook where sunshine , lingers. Though a little ridiculous, and not a little frivolous, this England is at auy rate less " British " than the England at home. It has learnt to believe , that virtue and intelligence and industry can be found on. both slides the Channel. It has learnt to disbelieve in the formula in which Englishmen sum; up their convictions about the Continental world, and, in disbelieving formulae which it knows to ibe false, to question other formulae too. i