A stream of eloquence followed—­studied or spontaneous it mattered not—­the congregation held their breath and listened to a story for the thousandth time repeated.

The preacher paused for a moment, and then with another burst of eloquence, he brought his hearers to the verge of a passion, which was (as it seemed to us) dangerously akin to human love and the worship of material beauty; then he lowered our understandings still more by the enumeration of ‘works and miracles,’ and ended with words of earnest exhortation, the burden of which might be shortly translated:—­’Pray earnestly, and always, to Mary our mother, for all souls in purgatory; confess your sins unto us your high priests; give, give to the Church and to the poor, strive to lead better lives, look forward ever to the end; and bow down, oh! bow down, before the golden images [manufactured for us in the next street] which our Holy Mother the Church has set up.’

With a transition almost as startling as the first, the book is closed, the preacher has left the pulpit, the congregation (excepting a few in the side chapels) have dispersed; and Caen keeps holiday after the manner of all good Catholics, putting on its best attire, and disporting itself in somewhat rampant fashion.

Everybody visits everybody else to-day, and a fiacre is hardly to be obtained for the afternoon drive in Les Cours, the public promenade.  We may go to the Jardin des Plantes, which we shall find crowded with country people, examining the beautiful exotic plants (of which there are several thousand); to the public Picture Gallery, established at the beginning of the present century, which contains pictures by Paul Veronese, Perugino, Poussin, and a number of works of the French school; and to the Museum of Antiquities, containing Roman remains, vases, coins, &c., discovered in the neighbourhood of Dives.  There are also excursions to Bayeux, Honfleur, and Trouville for the day; and many tempting opportunities of visiting the neighbouring towns.

But we may be most amused by mixing with the crowd, or by listening to the performance on the Place royale of a company of foreign musicians—­shabby and dingy in aspect, enthusiastic and poor—­who had found their way here in time to entertain the trim holiday makers of Caen.  They were of that ragged and unkempt order of slovenly brotherhood that the goddess of music claims for her own; let them call themselves ‘wandering minstrels,’ ‘Arabs,’ or what not (their collars were limp, and they rejoiced in smoke), they had certainly an ear for harmony, and a ‘soul for music;’ a talent in most of them, half cultivated and scarcely understood.  A woman in a German, or Swiss, costume levied rapid contributions amongst the crowd, which seemed to prefer listening to this performance than to any other ‘distraction,’ not excepting the modern and exciting performance of velocipede races outside the town.