Spiers: Memoranda of an autumn tour in 1836

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CONT. AUG. 19. FRIDAY.

shoulders which our capes protected, when as I before said we arrived at Bastogne & at a comfortable inn there we were so dry as to be without an excuse for going to bed. Edward had been asleep some part of the walk & on our resting on a tree at the roadside, he laid down on it & in 1/2 a minute was fast asleep. At the beginning of our walk the favorite maxim of my philosophy had been puzzled "that everything is for the best" and I could not at that moment possibly reconcile events to it. But I hoped so to do. We enjoyed a famous breakfast & hired a car to take us to Luxembourg 45 miles distant - by which means we hoped still to be in time for the departure of the packet boat which would counterbalance the additional expense of this private conveyance. For thirty francs complete he undertook us the journey - with one horse.

Before going further let me record that the finest park like view of large trees & greenwood I have yet seen greeted me 3 miles the other side of Bastogne. -

Still in Les Ardennes and ever up hill and down dale; every half hour nay every five minutes I had almost said with some sweet change in the kaleidoscope of this day's journey. In a hilly country indeed it cannot be otherwise, especially one that is wooded and watered. Much slate we saw today, many valleys with villages at the end of their green vistas - and at Arlon a good dinner & a cheap one with our pockets full of fruit to eat on the road. When the horse, and she was a good stiff little thing, could beat us in speed we got in to the car but when up a hill where we expected to have the best of it, out we jumped to walk. Trees are planted all along these high roads and highly ornamental though they may be, yet I fear MacAdam will not encourage them. His method of forming roads has been adopted throughout all the newly formed ones in Belgium

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