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when a swift transfer goes on of a score or two of hampers of fruit for some place further down the river, and, this business over, the boat is loosened and falls astern.

Jumiéges is a peninsula of ancient renown, almost the whole of it being once rich abbey land, whereon twelve centuries ago one religious establishment was founded on the ruins of another. The Normans destroyed the abbey in 840, and it was several times burned and rebuilt, lasting to the year 1790. Among the visitors to its eighty successive Abbés are reported to have been our Edward the Confessor and Harold.

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At Caudebec-en-Caux church with a curious spire, upon which three garlands of fleurs-delys of different sizes appear to have been naturally dropped, and so encircle it at regular intervals, making it like the triple crown.

Villequier, with its wooded views, is a place for painters, but it is complained that it is too far from Paris for artists, who flock to inferior beauties on the Marne and elsewhere. The river here has an unenviable notoriety for storms and peculiar tides. Some five-andthirty years ago a daughter of Victor Hugo's was drowned here with the other persons of her party in the boat. The bore, caused by the jump of the tide over a sand bar at the mouth of the firth, used to make itself felt here with terrible intensity, but its force has now been somewhat lessened by dams and other works lower down the river. We had the honour of meeting the phenomenon, which made our boat quiver and rock. From bank to bank like a straight wall advanced up the river wave after wave, at short intervals, five or six in all. We were at the time from thirty to forty miles from the sea. Had we been nearer no doubt these strange

waves would have met us with still greater volume and force.

After some woods like small editions of Cliefden, the river opened out, its banks became low alluvial plains, the great resort of sportsmen, and the life of the sea begins. We met fishing boats with their nets lying across them, and larger vessels also, for, since the river works, foreign ships can penetrate to Rouen with the aid of a pilot.

Lillebonne we soon pass, which affords an instance of the survival and modification of ancient names, it being the Juliobona of the Romans. Lillebonne has another distinction, namely, that in a castle there, at an assembly of barons, bishops, and abbés, the attempt on England was decided upon, which we know as the Norman Conquest.

The estuary widens further, and soon we are at Honfleur, whence half an hour's steam from bank to bank brings us to Havre-de-Grace. The voyage down the winding river from Rouen had taken about seven hours.

Havre, as we saw it during a brief search for the post-office and the baths on Sunday morning, was a place of small charm. The crowd in the streets reminded one of a fancy ball, so numerous and mixed were the nationalities, so extraordinary some of the personages. Women, overdressed in a style which would astonish Regentstreet, accompanied by little dogs ornamented with coloured bows, are jostled by Lascar sailors and strange uncouth beings whose nation or occupation it were hard to guess. In the midst of it all there walk a number of persons whom, from their dress and the smug faces they wear, one may judge to be the shopkeeping class taking its Sunday out; and yet many of the more garish and useless shops are open.

The frequent bird shops form a suitable background to the passing

crowd, with their gaudy-coloured parrots and strange, vivid-hued little birds, some so tiny that their small life is fascinating to contemplate. But Havre is only a crowded town-a great port where the individuality of the place itself seems almost destroyed by the clashing of many different forms of life. To a sensitive nature there is a certain jar and jangle in too indiscriminate a mixture of many kinds of men.

We gave ourselves little time to reform our opinion of the town; we were off early next morning. We had hoped to take the boat to Trouville, and thence to Caen, but the weather was too bad for the steamer to go at all. Determined not to stay at Havre, where we felt sure we should yawn ere the day was out, we discovered that we could get a boat to Honfleur, and thence go on by rail to Caen. We soon embarked on this steamer, and were much amused to see some of our travelling acquaintance reappear on this little vessel, which seemed prepared to take everyone to Honfleur who could not get a boat for anywhere else. At the very last moment the stately Englishman with the Murray marched on board, a trifle more flurried than usual, and soon took up a commanding position on the bridge, his dearly-loved book open in his hand, and his keen gaze intent on missing no point of interest recorded in the volume. Some Englishmen who stood among the little crowd to see us off remarked encouragingly that the "white horses were out and no mistake;" and, indeed, to look out from the harbour to the open sea was something rather alarming. Once outside the harbour we found ourselves riding waves so large that the rising upon them was something exhilarating. The sea was marvellous to look on;

the dark, angry, wind-blown water, raised by the rushing tide and a storm not quite over, being illumined from between the wild clouds by that strange and vivid sunshine which makes a stormy day so startling. It was living fast, as one of us said, to ride such a sea as this; the succession of sensations each moment was SO rapid and so opposite in character. To rise triumphantly upon a great wave fills one with a sense of power; the sight from the summit of the wave is a thing to awaken every artistic faculty that lies within us. But, descending into that great hollow which lies between us and the next rearing monster of the deep-then is one reduced only to a sense of the body, and a fancy that one is being whirled into nothingness dominates over all emotions of the mind.

From Honfleur a long and tedious railway journey took us to Granville, where we arrived in that sleepy and dismal condition when people are an easy prey to the first hotel porter who presents himself. This was the first day which we considered could scarcely be called one of easy holiday, yet it was luxurious compared with the life of those continental travellers who sit for twenty-four hours in a railway carriage, bolt upright, because there is the full number of passengers in the compartment, owing to the necessity for economy caused by the tax on carriages.

At Caen we broke the journey, and wandered to where two avenues meet at right angles, while near by are washerwomen of all ages in a shed over the river, performing their process with the river for a tub, a huge piece of soap with which they rub the linen, and a wooden spatula with which they beat it. We saw them afterwards at Granville following a similar plan, as indeed they may be seen

at Paris, but at Granville they seemed to have especially bare legs.

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Normandy swarms with priests, and one nearly succeeded making us miss a train. In exchange for a five-pound note twenty-five five-franc pieces had been sent from a bureau. These formed a heavy load, and the majority of them were treated as luggage. A ticket came to more than was expected; and, after the delay caused by finding up some more coins, one of " nos très chers frères" was in possession of the ticket window. He was slowly producing important-looking documents relative to himself and his confrères, which had to be inspected and countersigned at the office whilst other passengers were waiting for ordinary tickets. These documents were first a command to Brother So-and-So to remove himself from one locality to another; and, secondly, a prayer to the railway official to favour the good brother with half a place in the train. This is at worst, however, better than being a tailor.

On these journeys there was much to see. Normandy is a rich province, and there were noble stretches of lowlands to admire, where the cattle looked sleek and large and comfortable, and there was little to tell that we were on the south side of the Channel. We saw on that journey gleaning, ploughing, raking, and mowing; fields that we were told were of chicory in deep red harvest, and others with the herb in sheaves. We were sorry to have missed our journey by boat from the glimpses we obtained of the river, as, winding between thick fringes of young forest trees, it crossed our road. It is here, however, above Caen, at which place the steamer stops. There must have been a conside

rable amount of nursery planting of late years, perhaps owing to the effect of the scornful expression of M. Thiers, that there was more good timber in the London parks than in the whole of France.

Saint Remy might be chosen by anyone seeking a charming village among hills, where the people have a really pastoral air. We saw

somewhere near here or was it at Morgny ?-a shepherd of the oldfashioned kind known to children's books, a patriarchal man with a blue cloak reaching to his feet, a large flock and several obedient colley dogs.

Granville at first sight is a very unintelligible place. The baths at Granville one sees advertised at railway stations; but on arriving at the place itself there seems a remarkable absence of any such luxuries. Inspect the coast how you will, you can see nothing so civilised. But, after wearying yourself in useless investigation, if you inquire of the unwashedlooking inhabitants they will direct you to go inland, as it seems, to a casino. You will then find yourself suddenly in a little hidden bay, clean, bright and pretty, where there is a casino and a colony of bathing huts. But the situation of this place ever remained a mystery to us. failed to mount one of the high cliffs, whence perhaps we might have been better able to understand the perplexing geography of the place. This little nook, being the only clean place in the town, was the haunt of its aristocracy; that is to say, the few welldressed visitors compelled to pass a day or two in Granville, appeared to find it more endurable to use the reading-room of the casino than to remain in the dirty and uncomfortable hotels. At the hotel where we were located (which is said to

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be the best in the town) the bare floor of the great dining-room was so flagrantly unwashed as to take away one's appetite; and the managers had discovered an eminently economical mode of furnishing dessert. Fine dishes of peaches adorned the table; but we observed to our surprise, when they were handed round, that every person shook his head without even looking at the offered fruit. When they came to us, warily felt them-hard, as hard as stones. They must have been windfalls in a storm. Dessert on this system is an inexpensive item in a dinner, as the same peaches might well serve for several months, and it is but little use to complain; the hotel contained more people than it could properly serve, or cared to serve; people must sleep somewhere on their way to Jersey. Surely few people can look back on Granville with regret as they steam away from it. We did not, although we had a rough sea to cross, and had the sort of voyage in which pretty women disappear early in the day, and come on deck again at the last moment looking several years older. The delights of such a passage were added to by drenching rain, and the arrivals at Jersey certainly presented a ludicrously pitiable appearance.

The Channel Islands to our fancy pleasantly complete our wanderings and bring us home by a new road. But there is such a special character in both Jersey and Guernsey that justice can perhaps scarcely be done to this part of old Normandy at the end of a holiday, nor yet at the end of an article. But to us they are old favourites, and though we had left ourselves a very brief time to spend there, it was pleasant to scent the Guernsey sea breeze, which, as some think,

is fresher and sweeter and more filled with health-giving power than any other.

At the hotel at Guernsey we found we had been preceded a short time before by one of the earliest of English sensational novelists and her husband. The latter had endeavoured to obtain consideration from the hotel proprietor by representing that his wife's visit would be a feather in said proprietor's cap, since she was in England what Victor Hugo was in France. Why cannot people who blow their own trumpets bring out a true note?

At Jersey we noticed a very beautiful pink and white lily, which made us think of the sou briquet of the pretty daughter of the Dean. It is found in great profusion in Guernsey also, but is neither the Jersey lily nor the Guernsey, but the Belladonna. Only one gentleman in Jersey, it appears, had discovered that the lady in question possessed beauty before she became a reigning belle; and now the lily after which she is named cannot be identified.

Guernsey we quitted the morning after a storm, in which one boat had gone down, and another had been brought disabled into harbour by the rescue tug. After passing the dreaded Casquets, the water was quieter, and the day gradually improved. The air was so clear that, before we had lost sight of La Hogue, we could see the white headlands of Dorset. To the Needles we passed so near as to see them with unusual advan tage, and the chalk stained with greens, purples, and oranges might have inspired Turner.

We are in Southampton Water in very good time, but there is the bother of the Customs, and the special train seems to be unable for an hour to make up its mind to

start, and then eternally to stand still on the way for the amusement of the officials. But near midnight it dawdles into Waterloo. Ugly as is the station, it wears a homelike face; and, there being

only a cab drive more, hath a presage and promise about it of supper and bed at hand, which are never more welcome than after sixteen days of the easiest holiday, ending in a fifteen hours' journey.

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