A group of gossamer caps beneath a row of sad, gray-faced houses was
our Bayeux welcome. The faces beneath the caps watched our approach
with the same sobriety as did the old houses--they had the antique
Norman seriousness of aspect. The noise we made with the clatter and
rattle of our broken-down vehicle seemed an impertinence, in the face
of such severe countenances. We might have been entering a deserted
city, except for the presence of these motionless Normandy figures. The
cathedral met us at the threshold of the city: magnificent, majestic, a
huge gray mountain of stone, but severe in outline, as if the Norman
builders had carved on the vast surface of its facade an imprint of
their own grave earnestness.

We were somewhat early for the hot breakfast at Nigaud's. There was,
however, the appetizing smell of soup, with a flourishing pervasiveness
of onion in the pot, to sustain the vigor of an appetite whetted by a
start at dawn. The knickerbockers came in with the omelette. But one is
not a Briton on his travels for nothing; one does not leave one's own
island to be the dupe of French inn-keepers. The smell of the soup had
not departed with our empty plates, and the voice of the walkers was
not of the softest when they demanded their rights to be as odorous as
we. There is always a curiously agreeable sensation, to an American, in
seeing an Englishman angry; to get angry in public is one thing we
do badly; and in his cup of wrath our British brother is sublime--he is
so superbly unconscious--and so contemptuous--of the fact that the
world sometimes finds anger ridiculous.

At the other end of the long and narrow table two other travellers were
seated, a man and a woman. But food, to them, it was made manifestly
evident, was a matter of the most supreme indifference. They were at