TO those who call vexations vexations, as knowing what they are, there could not be a greater than to be the best part of a day at Lyons, the most opulent and flourishing city in France. It has an old cathedral, a castle on a hillside, ruins if I be not mistaken, two rivers, and I know not what besides. Baedeker devotes pages to it. Moreover, there is associated with it a story, that, to quote Mr. Tristram Shandy, who tells it, affords more pabulum to the brain than all the Frusts and Crusts and Rusts of antiquity, which travellers can cook up for it. You remember the tale? It is that of fond lovers, cruelly separated.——

each ignorant of the other’s course;

and finally, to cut it short, after long years of wandering for the one, imprisonment for the other, both coming unexpectedly at the same moment of the night, though by different ways, to the gate of Lyons, their native city, and each in well-known accents calling out aloud——

then, flying into each other’s arms, and both falling down dead for joy, to be buried in the tomb upon which Mr. Shandy had a tear ready to drop. But, alas! when he came—there was no tomb to drop it upon!

We expected letters, and began the day by a visit to the Post Office, where the clerk, after the manner of his kind in all countries, received and dismissed us with contemptuous incivility.—To be rid of all business, we next went to the CrÉdit Lyonnais to have some Bank of England notes changed for French gold. But the cashier looked at them and us with distrust, and would have nothing to do with our money.——

Where was our reference? he asked.

This was more than enough to put us in ill-humour. But J——, having looked up in his C. T. C. Handbook the address of the agent for cycle repairs in Lyons, and his place being found with difficulty, we walked in, under a pretext of asking about the road to Vienne, but really, I think, in search of sympathy.

We introduced ourselves as fellow-cyclers who had ridden all the way from Calais. But the agent was calmly indifferent, and scarcely civil.—Where should we find the national road to Vienne?—We had but to follow the RhÔne, on the opposite bank, and he bowed us towards the door. But just as we were going, he stopped us to ask what time we could make. J—— told him that yesterday we had come from La PacaudiÈre, a ride of one hundred and twenty odd kilometres, which was perfectly true. But that, it appeared, was nothing. The agent could not bear to be outdone, and so, of course, had a friend who could ride four hundred kilometres in twenty-eight hours.—Then J——, to my surprise, proceeded to tell him of the wonderful records we had never made. But the agent always had a friend who could beat us by at least a minute or a kilometre. In their excitement each was bent on breaking the other’s record, not of cycling, but of lying.

At the end J—— had worked himself up to quite a frenzy. When we were alone, and I took him to task, he was not at all repentant, but swore he was tired of such nonsense, and would outlie the fellows every time.

It was now noon, and we had already seen more than we wanted of Lyons. We went back to the hotel, strapped the bag on the tricycle, and without giving another thought to the cathedral and the curiosities we had not visited, we sallied forth to follow the RhÔne, determined never to set foot in this flourishing city again.