F.C.  BAYLOR.

[TO BE CONCLUDED.]

OUR VILLE.

The picturesqueness of France in our day is confined almost exclusively to its humble life.  The Renaissance and the Revolution swept away in most parts of the country moated castle, abbaye, grange, and chateau, to replace them with luxurious but conventional piles and ruins humbly restored and humbly inhabited.  Many a farmhouse with unkempt cour and dishevelled pelouse is the relic of a turreted chateau, stables are often desecrated churches, seigneurial colombiers shelter swine, and battlemented portals to fortified walls serve, as does the one of our ville, to house hideously-uniformed douaniers watching the luggage of arriving travellers.

Our ville was never an aristocratic one, and to this day very few of our names are preceded by the idealizing particle de.  We have an ancient history, however,—­so ancient that all historians place our origin at un temps tresrecule.  We had houses and walls when Rouen yonder was a marsh, and we saw Havre spring up like a mushroom only two little centuries and a half ago.  Besieged and taken, burned and ravaged, alternately by Protestant and Catholic, no wonder our ville has not even ruins to show that we are older than the fifteen hundreds.  Still, ancient though we are, we have always been a ville of humble folk,—­hardy sailors, brave fishers, and thrifty bourgeois,—­and to-day, as always, our highest families buy and sell and build their philistine homes back toward the cote, while our humble ones picturesquely haunt the quais.

The town is exquisitely situated at the foot of abrupt cotes, just where the broad and tranquil river shudders with mysterious deep heavings and meets its dolphin-hued death in the all-devouring sea.  Away off in the shimmering distance is the second seaport city of France.  On still days,—­and our gray or golden Norman days are almost always still,—­faint muffled sounds of life, the throbbing of factories, the farewell boom of cannon from ships setting forth across the Atlantic, even the musical notes of the Angelus, float across the water to us as dreamily vague as perhaps our earth-throbs and passion-pulses reach a world beyond the clouds.  This city is our metropolis, with which we are connected by small steamers crossing to and fro with the tide, and where all our shopping is done, our own ville being too thoroughly limited and roturier in taste to merit many of our shekels.

In fact, such of our shopping as is done in our ville is in the quaint marketplace, where black house-walls are beetling and bent, and Sainte-Catherine’s ancient wooden tower stands the whole width of the Place away from its Gothic church.  Here we bargain and chaffer with towering bonnets blancs for peasant pottery and faience, paintable half-worn stuffs, and delicious ancestral odds and ends of broken peasant households.