"No blame attached to the officers"-- that lying and disaster-breeding verdict so common to our softhearted juries is seldom rendered in France.

If the trouble occurred in the conductor's department, that officer must suffer if his subordinate cannot be proven guilty; if in the engineer's department and the case be similar, the engineer must answer.
The Old Travelers--those delightful parrots who have "been here before" and know more about the country than Louis Napoleon knows now or ever will know--tell us these things, and we believe them because they are pleasant things to believe and because they are plausible and savor of the rigid subjection to law and order which we behold about us everywhere.
But we love the Old Travelers.

We love to hear them prate and drivel and lie.

We can tell them the moment we see them.

They always throw out a few feelers; they never cast themselves adrift till they have sounded every individual and know that he has not traveled.