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7

March 21, On the Orient Express in Gare L'Est, leaving in an hour for Vienna.----- You see I got this train on time. Here you wait in the train instead of in a waiting room.----- It was raining again when I was transferred to the lighter at Cherbourg. It was very easy going through the custom house. A Cook man, directed me where to get money changed, how to get to the station, etc. It was too late to get to Paris in time for the train for the East that night, unfortunately, we were due at Cherbourg early in the morning, but it was after three in the afternoon. -----The journey through Normandy was beautiful. The country is something like northern Illinois, but many times wetter. There were the same flooded prairies and muddy barnyards I have seen in Illinois in early spring, but the part of the landscape due to man was very different. The low stone houses with tiled roofs covered with moss, the walled gardens with trees trained on the walls, and especially the trees pruned to a single stem, now bearing new twigs and delicate spring foliage their entire length formed pictures very different from anything I had ever seen. The orchard trees were covered with lichens and there was ivy everywhere. Many places looked like living Corot pictures. It was raining, but the rain seemed to belong to that kind of landscape and only added to the beauty. It was dark all too soon.------ It was about midnight when we reached Paris. There was no Cook man at the train, so a woman who had been on the America and was on the train suggested we get a room at a hotel together to make it cheaper. She was a buyer for wholesale houses and knew Paris. She had talked to me a lot about the Lord, when I wanted my mind free to enjoy lovely Normandy, and she had a book the title of which was French for Science and Health, so I dreaded being bored, But I acceded, and we got a room at --hold your breath-- Le Grand Hotel on Place de l'Opera, just the way they do in the Berlitz books we studied. It was $5 for the two of us, so it wasn't quite so terrible as I feared.