The streets are crowded all day with holiday people, and somewhat obstructed by the fashion of the inhabitants taking their meals in the street.  We also, in the evening, dine at an open cafe (with a marble table and a pebble floor) amidst a clamour and confusion of voices, under the shadow of old eaves—­with creepers and flowers twining round nearly every window, where the pigeons lurk and dive at stray morsels.  The evening is calm and bright and the sky overhead a deep blue, but we are chattering, laughing, eating, and smoking, clinking glasses and shouting to waiters; we drown even the sound of the church clocks, and if it were not for the little flower girls with their ’deux sous, chaque’ and their winning smiles, and for the children playing on the ground around us, we might soon forget our better natures in the din of this culinary pandemonium.

But we are in good company; three tall mugs of cider are on the next table to our own, a dark, stout figure, with shaven crown, is seated with his back to us—­it is the preacher of the morning, who with two lay friends for companions, also keeps the feast.

DIVES.

Before leaving the neighbourhood of Caen, the antiquary and historically minded traveller will naturally turn aside and pay a visit to the town of DIVES, about eighteen miles distant, near the sea shore to the north-east, on the right bank of the river Dives.  It is interesting to us not only as an ancient Roman town, and as being the place of embarkation of the Conqueror’s flotilla, from whence it drifted, with favourable winds, to St. Valery—­but because it possesses the remains of one of the finest twelfth-century churches in Normandy.  We find hardly any mention of this church in ‘Murray,’ and it stands almost deserted by the town which once surrounded it, and by the sea, on the shore of which it was originally built.  At the present time there are not more than eight or nine hundred inhabitants, but we can judge by the size of the old covered market-place, and the extent of the boundaries of the town, that it must have been a seaport of considerable importance.  Dives was once rich, but no longer bears out the meaning of its name; in comparison to the thriving town of Cabourg (which it joins), it is more like Lazarus sitting at the gate.

The interior of the church at Dives has been restored, repaired, and whitewashed; but neither time nor whitewash can conceal the lovely proportions of the building; the pillars and aisles, and the carving over the doorways which the twelfth-century mason fashioned so tenderly have little left of his most delicate workmanship; half of the stained glass in the chancel windows has been destroyed, and the pinnacles on the roof have been broken down by rude hands.  Nevertheless it is a church worth going far to see; and it will have exceptional interest for those who believe that their ancestors ‘came over with the Conqueror,’ for on the western wall there is a list of the names