bother about tea and cakes until you are reminded by a rosy, white-capped maid of Normandy that this beauty has its roots in utility, and that he who looks must also eat and drink. And when the tea and cakes come, you are fairly saturated with the charm of the inn of Guillaume-le-Conquérant and quite ready to confess that the half had not been told you.

Presently you will go out and see the ancient timber-market building and the exquisite church, with the long list of the

names of the gentlemen who went with William to England on that eventful voyage inscribed on the west wall, and you will mourn the silent decay of those delicate carvings, the neglect of that beautiful architecture; but you will go back again to the inn and wonder, in your happy indifference to dates, how William ever left a place so peaceful, so fragrant, so steeped in charm. It may be a little artificial, a little too much elaborated, but pitiful is the lot of the cynic and skeptic

when he travels. Where the man of imagination and sympathy sees loveliness in the inn at Dives or in the blossoming way up the cliff at Clovelly, the cynic hears only the jingling of francs and shillings, and detects everywhere the guile of the innkeeper.

The social instinct of the French shows itself in shops and streets, and wears its most attractive aspects in the smaller towns. In Paris one feels at times as if the people lived in the highways, and that the houses contain only sleepingrooms. Behind the flutter and stir of the boulevards there is another and quieter Paris which is, for all the more solid and finer activities and interests of life, the real Paris-the Paris of art, literature, science, philanthropy, society; but it is the out-of-door life of the streets, the parks, the Bois, which the visitor finds always in evidence. In the provinces there seems to be the same pervading social sense, the same habit of finding pleasure in companionship; but there is also a background of domesticity, a consciousness of home and family life, the charm of which is deeply felt in the best French fiction and biography. The Nor

mans are less excitable than the people of the southern provinces, but they have the racial gayety, volubility, expressiveness of gesture. They are courteous, as people are everywhere in France except in Paris. In the smaller towns in Normandy foreign visitors are comparatively few, and one may travel for days and hear no word of English spoken.

In Rouen there are so many beautiful churches that one is tempted to forget all other interests and surrender himself to the loveliness of the French Gothic, with its masses of flower-like carving, its delicate manipulation of stone as if there were something fluid in the material which it shapes with a hand at once free and sensitive. One understands what the Florentines meant when they called their sculptors "masters of live stone." This free, masterful treatment of material is the sign always of the creative age.

The Cathedral and St. Ouen, to say nothing of the loveliness of St. Sauveur and St. Pierre, and of four or five other churches, any one of which would give distinction to a modern city, make you aware of the vast change in interest and feeling which separates the modern age

Rouen one longs for the return of beauty, of reverence in stone and color, for the touch of the spirit on the vast wealth of an age which toils with hand and brain in order that a later and nobler age may live once more, and with a larger free dom, the life of the spirit.

This sense of old-time richness deepens as one comes to know Rouen more inti

mately, and even the pathetic memories of Jean Arc, the romantic heritage of the old city, mingle and are lost in it. Here, as truly as in Oxford, linger "the last enchantments of the Middle-age;" here, as from the towers of Magdalen and New, the mellow chants of the old days assail one. The sculptured dials on the great clock; the Palais de Justice, with

its richly carven façade; the lovely Hôtel, now used as a bank, with the beautiful tower and windows, not far from the spot where Jean d'Arc was burned; the fronts of old houses, the glimpses of ancient streets with noble doorways and windows, keep one in touch with the old city behind the busy, modern, manufacturing town. The little garden of the hotel, with its cool splash of water in the tiny grotto, was a place of rest and refreshment after weary but enriching wanderings through the streets; and the courtesy and friendliness of servants and managers, the easy air of ample time for play and work, were in key with the hospitable calm of the garden.

The Normandy roads are so perfect that you long for your wheel and a summer at your command, and you imagine all the wealth of detail with which you fill in the picture the long slope of side hills stirred into shimmering light by the breath of the wind on the grain; the thatched houses with the long stables and

granaries; the dip of the road in the hollow where the little stream runs under a low arch of stone into a covert of trees; the lift of a hill with cattle browsing; the heavy carts drawn by stout horses; the stolid-looking men in blouses; the sudden view of a white-walled village, which reminds you of Cazin; the low round tower with the conical roof, and the highpitched roofs of white châteaux; the thousand details of foliage, grouping, shading, which give the trees of France an atmosphere of their own.

In the presence or the memory of this landscape and of the incalculable richness of architecture which dominates it in climbing spire and carven tower, you wonder again how William the Conqueror tore himself away from a province so rich in tradition and in beauty, until you remind yourself that all these things are of a later growth, and that in leaving Normandy, even for a time, the founder of the Norman dynasty found England, the garden of the world.

H. F. W.