Ch. 3: France

'Girls, I have had a scintillation in the night: listen and approve!' said Amanda, coming into the room where her comrades sat upon the floor, in the first stages of despair, at the impossibility of getting the accumulated rubbish of three months' travel into a couple of immense trunks.

'Blessed girl! you always bring a ray of light just at the darkest moment,' returned Lavinia, with a sigh of relief, while Matilda looked over a barricade of sketch-books bristling with paint-brushes, and added anxiously,--

'If you could suggest how I am to work this miracle, you will be a public benefactor.'

'Behold the amendment I propose,' began Amanda, perching herself on one of the arks. 'We have decided to travel slowly and comfortably through France to Switzerland, stopping where we like, and staying as long as we please at any place we fancy, being as free as air, and having all the world before us where to choose, as it were.'

'The route you have laid out is a charming one, and I don't see how you can improve it,' said Lavinia, who, though she was supposed to be the matron, guide, and protector of the younger girls, was in reality nothing but a dummy, used for Mrs. Grundy's sake, and let the girls do just as they pleased, only claiming the right to groan and moan as much as she liked when neuralgia, her familiar demon, claimed her for its own.

'One improvement remains to be made. Are these trunks a burden, a vexation of spirit, a curse?' demanded Amanda, tapping one with her carefully cherished finger-tips.

'They are! they are!' groaned the others, regarding the monsters with abhorrence.

'Then let us get rid of them, and set out with no luggage but a few necessaries in a shawl-strap.'

'We will! we will!' returned the chorus.

'Shall we burn up our rubbish, or give it away?' asked Lavinia, who liked energetic measures, and was ready to cast her garments to the four winds of heaven, to save herself from the agonies of packing.

'I shall never give up my pictures, nor my boots!' cried Matilda, gathering her idols to her breast in a promiscuous heap.

'Be calm and listen,' returned the scintillator. 'Pack away all but the merest necessaries, and we will send the trunk by express to Lyons. Then with our travelling-bags and bundles, we can follow at our leisure.'

"Tis well! 'tis well!' replied the chorus, and they all returned to their packing, which was performed in the most characteristic manner.

Amanda never seemed to have any clothes, yet was always well and appropriately dressed; so it did not take her long to lay a few garments, a book or two, a box of Roman-coin lockets, scarabæ brooches, and cinque-cento rings, likewise a swell hat and habit, into her vast trunk; then lock and label it in the most business-like and thorough manner.

Matilda found much difficulty in reconciling paint-pots and silk