"Don't you love the
smell of grease about the engine of a Channel steamer? Isn't there a
lot of hope in it?" said Ernest to me, for he had been to Normandy one
summer as a boy with his father and mother, and the smell carried
him back to days before those in which he had begun to bruise
himself against the great outside world. "I always think one of the
best parts of going abroad is the first thud of the piston, and the
first gurgling of the water when the paddle begins to strike it."
It was very dreamy getting out at Calais, and trudging about with
luggage in a foreign town at an hour when we were generally both of us
in bed and fast asleep, but we settled down to sleep as soon as we got
into the railway carriage, and dozed till we had passed Amiens. Then
waking when the first signs of morning crispness were beginning to
show themselves, I saw that Ernest was already devouring every
object we passed with quick sympathetic curiousness. There was not a
peasant in a blouse driving his cart betimes along the road to market,
not a signalman's wife in her husband's hat and coat waving a green
flag, not a shepherd taking out his sheep to the dewy pastures, not
a bank of opening cowslips as we passed through the railway
cuttings, but he was drinking it all in with an enjoyment too deep for
words.
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