The old inhabitants are, of course, ‘rather particular,’ and, to tell the truth, are sometimes rather afraid of each other.  They are apt to eye with considerable caution any new arrival; the ‘new arrival’ is disposed to be equally select, and so they live together and apart, after the true English model; and indulging sometimes, it must be added, in considerable speculation about their new neighbours’ business.

  ’Why were they proud—­because red-lined accounts
  Were richer than the songs of Grecian years? 
  Why were they proud—­again we ask, aloud,
  Why in the name of glory were they proud?’

And so on; but what we might say of Avranches would apply to nearly every little English colony abroad.  There are two sides to the picture, and there is a good, pleasant side to the English society at Avranches; there is also great necessity to be ‘particular,’ however much we may laugh.  English people who come to reside abroad are not, as a rule, very good representatives of their nation; neither they nor their children seem to flourish on a foreign soil, they differ in their character as much as transplanted trees; they have more affinity with the poplars and elms of France than with the sturdy oaks of England.[27]

Let us not be thought to disparage Avranches; if it is our lot to live here we may enjoy life well; and if we are not deterred by the dull and ‘weedy’ aspect of some of the old chateaux, we may also make some pleasant friends amongst the French families in the neighbourhood.

In summer time we may almost live out of doors, and ramble about in the fields and sketch, as we should do in England; the air is fresh and bracing, and the sea breeze comes gratefully on the west wind.  We may stroll through shady lanes and between hedgerows, and we shall hear the familiar sound of bells, and see through the trees a church tower, such as the following (which is indeed the common type throughout Normandy); but here the similarity to England ceases, for we may enter the building at any hour, and find peasant women at prayers.

[Illustration]

And we may see sometimes a party of English girls from a French school, with their drawing master; sketching from nature and making minute studies of the brandies of trees.  They are seated on a hill-side, and there is a charming pastoral scene before them,—­wood and water, pasture-land and cattle grazing,—­women with white caps, and little white houses peeping through the trees.

But the trees that they are studying are small and characterless compared with our own, they are scattered about the landscape, or set in trim lines along the roads:  our fair artists had better be in England for this work.  There is none of the mass and grandeur here that we see in our forest trees, none of the suggestive groups with which we are so familiar, even in the parks of London, planted ‘by accident’ (as we are apt to call it), but standing together