rchy, and which was mercilessly
razed to the ground and abolished from off the face of the earth, little
more than three hundred years ago, by the victorious emperor Charles the
Fifth.

Of this artificial department Calais is neither the chief town nor
capital. It has scarcely a third of the population of Boulogne, and not
much more than half the population of Arras, which is the seat of the
prefecture; and though it is by no means so dreary and uninteresting a
place as the casual traveller, seeing only the landing-pier, and the new
station, which bears the name of the heroic Eustache de St.-Pierre, is
apt to take it to be, it cannot compare, in point of beauty and
interest, either with Boulogne or with Arras. But as the French head of
the great historic ferry between England and the Continent, and as the
seat of sundry thriving factories, it is both a busy and prosperous
town. I found its streets swarming with people and its houses a flutter
of flags and banners, when I came to it on June 3, 1889, to see the
'inauguration,' by President Carnot, of the works on which the French
Government has been spending millions of francs during the past decade,
with an eye to deepening and enlarging the harbour. The weather was
magnificent. Several men-of-war of the Channel squadron lay off the
port. Excursion steamers came in from England, bringing members of
Parliament and miscellaneous British subjects, of the sort once
indignantly denounced to me by the little old verger of a Midland
cathedral as 'them terrible trippers.' The active and good-natured
railway porters at the station were worn out with throngs of travellers
pouring in from all the country round about. There was much animation
everywhere, but nowhere any enthusiasm, though Calais, I suppose, must
be a republican town, as at the election of a deputy, held here in 1886,
the Government candidate, M. Camescasse, received 5,196 votes against
2,233 given to his Conservative opponent, M. Labitte. I am told, too,
there is a good deal of Socialism among the factory workmen; and I can
see that the place is full of _cabarets_ and _debits_, flowing not only
with light beer and sour wine, but with spirits of a sort to make the
consumers more clamorous about the rights than solicitous about the
duties of man.

I heard, in the course of the day, that at some points in his progress,
the President was received with cries of 'Vive Boulanger!' but nothing
of this sort passed under my