the family methods of the small French inn, where
excellent cooking goes along with many primitive usages. The cool
salle-a-manger is reached through the general living-room and kitchen,
which is largely filled with the table where you may see the proprietor
and his family partaking of their own meals. There seems no room to cook
anything at all, and yet when you are seated in the next room the
daughter of the family, an attractive and neatly dressed girl,
gracefully serves the most admirable courses, worthy and perhaps better
than what one may expect to obtain in the best hotel in Rouen.

There is a road that passes right through the forest of Conches towards
Rugles, but that must be left for another occasion if we are to see
anything of the charms of Beaumont-le-Roger, the perfectly situated little
town that lies half-way between Conches and Bernay.

The long street of the town containing some very charming peeps as you go
towards the church is really a terrace on the limestone hills that rises
behind the houses on the right, and falls steeply on the left. Spaces
between the houses and narrow turnings give glimpses of the rich green
country down below. From the lower level you see the rocky ridge above
clothed in a profusion of trees. The most perfect picture in the town is
from the river bank just by the bridge. In the foreground is the
mirror-like stream that gives its own rendering of the scene that is built
up above it. Leaning upon a parapet of the bridge is a man with a rod who
is causing tragedies in the life that teems beneath the glassy surface.
Beyond the bridge appear some quaint red roofs with one tower-like house
with an overhanging upper storey. Higher up comes the precipitous hill
divided into terraces by the huge walls that surround the abbey buildings,
and still higher, but much below the highest part of the hill, are the
picturesque ruins of the abbey. On the summit of the ridge dominating all
are the insignificant remains of the castle built by Roger a la Barbe,
whose name survives in that of the town. His family were the founders of
the abbey that flourished for several centuries, but finally, about a
hundred years ago, the buildings were converted to the uses of a factory!
Spinning and weaving might have still been going on but for a big fire that
destroyed the whole place. There was, however, a considerably more complete
series of buildings left than we can see to-day, but scarcely more than
fift