But I will let my readers off easy, recording only that I walked from Murat to St.Flour, a distance of fifteen miles, in five minutes under three hours.

Not bad! My diary notes that it was frequently very difficult to find my way in walking about Auvergne, from the paucity of people I could find who could speak French, the _langue du pays_ being as unintelligible as Choctaw.
This would hardly be the case now.
I don't know whether a knot of leading tradesmen at Bordeaux could now be found to talk, as did such a party with whom I got into conversation in that year, 1840.

It was explained to me that England, as was well known, had liberated her slaves in the West Indies perfectly well knowing that the colonies would be absolutely ruined by the measure, but expecting to be amply compensated by the ruin of the French colonies, which would result from the example, and the consequent extension of trade with the East Indies, from which France would be compelled to purchase all the articles her own colonies now supplied her with.

One of these individuals told me and the rest of his audience, that he had the means of _knowing_ that the interest of the English national debt was paid every year by fresh borrowing, and that bankruptcy and absolute smash must occur within a few years.
"Ah!" said a much older, grey-headed man, who had been listening sitting with his hands reposing on his walking-stick before him, and who spoke with a sort of patient, long-expecting hope and a deep sigh, "ah! we have been looking for that many a year; but I am beginning to doubt whether I shall live to see it." My assurances that matters were not altogether so bad as they supposed in England of course met with little credence.

Still, they listened to me, and did not show angry signs of a consciousness that I was audaciously befooling them, till the talk having veered to London, I ventured to assure them that London was not surrounded by any _octroi_ boundary, and that no impost of that nature was levied there.[1] Then in truth I might as well have assured them that London streets were literally paved with gold.
[Footnote 1: It may possibly be necessary to tell untravelled Englishmen that the _octroi_, universal on the Continent, is an impost levied on all articles of consumption at the gates of a town.] On the 30th of May, 1840, I returned with my mother from Paris to her house in York Street.