Caen seated in its plain, wearing its crown of steeples--this was our
last glimpse of the beautiful city. Our way to Bayeux was strewn thick
with these Normandy jewels; with towns smaller than Caen; with Gothic
belfries; with ruined priories, and with castles, stately even when
tottering in decay. When the last castle was lost in a thicket, we
discovered that our iron horse was stopping in the very middle of a
field. If the guard had shouted out the name of any American city,
built overnight, on a Western prairie, we should have felt entirely at
home in this meadow; we should have known any clearing, with grass
and daisies, was a very finished evidence of civilization at high
pressure.

But a lane as the beginning of a cathedral town!

Evidently Bayeux has had a Ruskinian dread of steam-whistles, for this
ancient seat of bishops has succeeded in retaining the charms of its
old rustic approaches, whatever else it may have sacrificed on the
altar of modernness.

An harangue, at the door of the quaint old Normandy omnibus, by the
driver of the same, was proof that the lesson of good oratory,
administered by generations of bishops, had not been lost on the Bayeux
inhabitants. Two rebellious English tourists furnished the text for the
driver's sermon; they were showing, with all the naive pride of
pedestrians, their intention of footing the distance between the
station and the cathedral. This was an independence of spirit no Norman
could endure to see. What? these gentlemen proposed to walk, in the
sun, through clouds of dust, when here was a carriage, with ladies for