window filled with flowers, and a dark-eyed maiden
peeping through the leaves; the fish-wives in short petticoats and with
high white caps, clattering over the stones in their wooden _sabots_,
wheeling barrows of fish to the market near the station, where they
bartered, and bargained, and gossiped. Evidently it is a woman's right
in Normandy to work--to grow as withered, and hard, and old before the
time as she chooses, or as she has need; for to put away year after
year, as do these poor women, every grace and charm of womanhood, cannot
be of choice.

At the long table in the refreshment-room of the station we drank the
tasteless tea, and ate a slice from the roll four feet in length. The
English-speaking girl who attended us found a place--rough enough, to be
sure--where in the few moments of waiting we could complete our hasty
toilets. Beside us at the table, our fellow-voyagers, were two
professors from a Connecticut college of familiar name, whom we had met
in London. They joined us in the comfortable railway carriage, and added
not a little to the pleasant chat that shortened the long day and the
weary journey to Paris. Our number--for the compartment held eight--was
completed by a young American gentleman, and a Frenchman of evil
countenance, who drank wine and made love to his pretty Lizette in an
unblushing manner, strange, and by no means pleasing, to us,
demonstrating the annoyance, if nothing worse, to which one is often
subjected in these compartment cars. It needed but one glance from the
window to convince us that we were no longer in England. To be sure, the
sky is blue, the grass green, in all lands; but in place of the level
sweep of meadow through which we had passed across the Channel, the land
swelled here into hills on every side. Long rows of stiff poplars
divided the fields, or stretched away in straight avenues as far as the
eye could reach. The English remember the beauty of a curved line; the
French, with a painful rectitude, describe only right angles. Scarlet
poppies blushed among the purple, yellow, and white wild flowers along
the way. The plastered cottages with their high, thatched roofs, the
tortuous River Seine with its green islands, as we neared Paris, the
neat little stations along the way--like gingerbread houses--made for us
a new and charming panorama. Hanging over a gate at one of these
stations was an old man, white-haired, blind; his guide, an old woman,
who waited, with a ki