[23] The sketch of the pulpit (made on the spot by the author) is erroneously stated in the List of Illustrations to be from a photograph.

[24] At the cathedral at Coutances the service is held under the great tower, and the effect is most melodious from above.

[25] In an article in the Pall Mall Gazette, on the ’woman of the future,’ the writer argues that:—­’As beauty is more or less a matter of health, too much can never be said against the abuse of it.  Quite naturally the fragile type of beauty has become the standard of the present day, and men admire in real lift the lily-cheeked, small-waisted, diaphanous-looking creatures idealized by living artists.  When we become accustomed to a nobler kind of beauty we shall attain to a loftier ideal.  Men will seek nobility rather than prettiness, strength rather than weakness, physical perfection rather than physical degeneracy, in the women they select as mothers of their children.  Artists will rejoice and sculptors will cease to despair when this happy consummation is reached—­let none regard it as chimerical or Utopian.’

[26] The railway from Paris to Granville is nearly finished; and another line is in progress to connect Cherbourg, Coutances, Granville, and St. Malo.

[27] If this were the place to enlarge upon the general question of bringing children abroad to be educated, we might suggest, at the outset, that there were certain English qualities, such as manliness and self-reliance; and certain English sports, such as cricket, hunting and the like, which have less opportunity of fair development in boys educated abroad.  And as to girls—­who knows the impression left for life on young hearts, by the dead walls and silent trees of a French pension?

[28] It is well that sportsmen do not always make a good bag, for another drawback to the pleasures of sport in France is the ’heavy octroi duty which a successful shot has to pay upon every head of game which he takes back to town.’  For a pheasant (according to the latest accounts) he has to pay ’3f. 50c. to 4f.; for a hare, 1f. 50c. to 2f.; for a rabbit, 75c. to 1f. 25c.; for a partridge, 75c. to 1f. 50c. the pound; and for every other species of feathered game, 18c. the kilogramme.’

[29] The island, in this illustration, appears, after engraving, to be about two miles nearer the spectator, and to be less covered with houses, than it really is.

[30] During the last few years the prisoners have all been removed from Mont St. Michael.

[31] The sands are so shifting and variable, that it is impossible to cross with safety, excepting by well-known routes, and at certain times of the tide; many lives, even of the fishermen and women, have been lost on these sands.

[32] It a irresistible, here, not to compare in our minds, with these twelfth-century relics of magnificence and festivity, certain emblazoned ‘civic banquets,’ and the gay ‘halls by the sea,’ with which the child (old or young) of the nineteenth century is enraptured—­the former being the realities of a chivalrous epoch; the latter, masquerades or money speculations, of a more advanced century.  The comparison may be considered unjust, but it is one that suggests itself again and again, as typical of a curiously altered state of society and manners.