[Footnote 3: When in London, two years later, I saw a gentleman of rather striking appearance pass my door for two months, five or six times of a morning. Remembering the apathy of the Norman peasant, I at length asked who it was--"Sir Francis Burdett," was the answer.]
I once inquired of a servant girl, at a French inn, who might be the owner of a chateau near by, the gate of which was within a hundred feet of the house we were in. She was unable to say, urging, as an apology, that she had only been six weeks in her present place! This, too, was in a small country hamlet. I think every one must have remarked, _coeteris paribus_, how much more activity and curiosity of mind is displayed by a countryman who first visits a town, than by the dweller in a city who first visits the country. The first wishes to learn everything, since be has been accustomed to understand everything he has hitherto seen; while the last, accustomed to a crowd of objects, usually regards most of the novel things he now sees for the first time with indifference.
The road, for the rest of the afternoon, led us over hills and plains, from one reach of the river to another, for we crossed the latter repeatedly before reaching Paris. The appearance of the country was extraordinary in our eyes. Isolated houses were rare, but villages dotted the whole expanse. No obtrusive colours; but the eye had frequently to search against the hill-side, or in the valley, and, first detecting a mass, it gradually took in the picturesque angles, roofs, towers, and walls of the little _bourg_. Not a fence, or visible boundary of any sort, to mark the limits of possessions. Not a hoof in the fields grazing, and occasionally, a sweep of mountain-land resembled a pattern-card, with its stripes of green and yellow, and other hues, the narrow fields of the small proprietors. The play of light and shade on these gay upland patches though not strictly in conformity with the laws of taste, certainly was attractive. When they fell entirely into shadow, the harvest being over, and their gaudy colours lessened, they resembled the melancholy and wasted vestiges of a festival.
At Louviers we dined, and there we found a new object of wonder in the church. It was of the Gothic of the _bourgs_, less elaborated and more rudely wrought than that of the larger towns, but quaint, and, the population considered, vast. Ugly dragons thrust out their grinning heads at us from the buttresses. The most agreeable monstrosities imaginable were crawling along the grey old stones. After passing this place, the scenery lost a good deal of the pastoral appearance which renders Normandy rather remarkable in France, and took still more of the starched pattern-card look, just mentioned. Still it was sombre, the villages were to be extracted by the eye from their setting of fields, and here and there one of those "silent fingers pointing to the skies" raised itself into the air, like a needle, to prick the consciences of the thoughtless. The dusky hues of all the villages contrasted oddly, and not unpleasantly, with the carnival colours of the grains.