afield.

But it is with the story of their home-town that I have now to do. And
if it is to be told within the bounds of your patience and my
opportunity, that story must be limited, if not by the old walls of
the city, then by the shortest circuit of the suburbs round it. Nor
need we lose much by this circumscribing of our purpose. The life of
Normandy was concentrated in its capital. The slow march of events
from the independence as a Duchy to the incorporation as a part of
France has left footprints upon all the thoroughfares of the town. The
development of mediaeval Rothomagus into modern Rouen has stamped its
traces on the stones of the city, as the falling tide leaves its own
mark upon the timbers of a seaworn pier. It will be my business to
point your steps to these traces of the past, and from the marks of
what you see to build up one after another the centuries that have
rolled over tide-worn Rouen. Let it be said at once that the "Old
Rouen" you will first see is almost completely a French Renaissance
city of the sixteenth century. Of older buildings you will find only
slight and imperfect remnants, and as you pass monstrosities more
modern you will involuntarily close your eyes. But the remnants are
there, slight as they are; and they are worth your search for them, as
we try together to reconstruct the ancient city of which they formed a
part.

Rouen has in its turn been the most southerly city of a Norman Duke's
possessions, then the central fortress of an Angevin Empire that
stretched from Forth to Pyrenees, then a northern bulwark for the
Kings of Paris against the opposing cliffs of England. It has sent out
fleets upon the sea, and armies upon land. It has been independent of
its neighbours, it has led them against a common foe, and it has
undergone with them a national disaster. But no matter who were its
rulers, or by what title it was officially described, or how it has
been formally divided, eternal bars and doors have been set for its
inhabitants by the mountains and the waters, eternal laws have been
made for them by the clouds and the stars that cannot be altered. In
the natural features that remain the same to-day, in the labourers of
the soil, and in the toilers of the city, there has been the least
change. For these are the "dim unconsidered populations" upon whom the
real brunt of war falls, the units who compose the battalions, the
pieces in the game who have little or no share in the stak