stuck over with cheap prints—lined in the ceiling
with small cheeses—adorned by a glass
case, like a surgeon's bottle, containing frogs,
for he judges of the weather by their rising and
falling in the water. Well, the peasant will
offer you cider, and bring out, too, one of the
expansive loaves of his duskyish but wholesome
bread. I made a diversion by diligence from
Rouen to Gournay, once the seat of the great
chiefs of Gournay, from whom descended the
Gurneys and Mrs. Fry. A peasant in blue blouse,
who was in the banquette with me, sang
Béranger's "Roi d'Yvetot," expressly to please
the stranger, and admirably well, too, albeit
another traveller hinted to him that
Béranger was "défendu" in Prance. All this
kind of thing ought to be allowed for, and it
would be unfair in me not to mention it just
now.

But to our train again, which goes whistling
away from Bayeux—not very fast—on its road.
We are now carried out of the department
of Calvados into that of La Manche, and
we enter on the old "Cotentins"—the
picturesque section of "Basse Normandie" in which
lies the seaport, our destination. At Carentan,
where Bishop Serlo clipped the too long hair of
our Henry the First and his "swells," we seem
to smell the sea at a few miles' distance. The
coast along towards the north-west, towards
Barfleur and La Hogue, is esteemed particularly
beautiful; long sands stretching first, and then
a rocky rampart rising bold and variously over
the sea line. La Hogue was the scene of our
naval glory against Tourville in sixteen ninety-
two, when Louis the Fourteenth was aiming at
a French despotism in things European, such as
neither our pride nor our policy will ever
permit. They say, that even now, in the high
tides of spring and autumn, and when the wind
and waves burst mightily on these shores, the
fishermen find some débris of the wreck of
Tourville's fleet, and that rusty English cannonballs
wash out of the sand.

We have been running through a pleasant
and varied landscape meanwhile, and one rich
still in associations. We have crossed long,
flat, green meadows, very moist in rainy
weather, when they overflow, and dotted with
jolly-looking red kine; through bits of English
landscape (as in Upper Normandy), full of
hedged fields, orchards, and waving woods. The
village of Brix or Brus, cradle of the race of the
great King Robert, has been visible away on the
sky line to our right. Many a troop of English
cavaliers and English archers—the men of
Chaucer and of Froissart—have defiled, with their
banners flying, adown these wooded hills in the
fierce Plantagenet wars. Arid now the
landscape becomes wilder, as at home when we fly
northward and get out of the midland counties.
We pass through rocky valleys clothed with fir
and pine, and leave altogether behind us the
hasty yellow waters of the little Ouve. We
could fancy ourselves in Scotland, but we miss
the frequent ruin and frequent country seat,
significant of a land which is prosperous now,
without (like France) having broken with its
past or its institutions. At last we run right
through a cleft between two valleys, and the
passage brings us out at the station of Cherbourg,
at the back of the town. A huge clump of a
hill is behind us; trees planted to make shady
alleys and walks are near, amidst the rather
mean-looking suburbs of what we yet see to be
a considerable place. Leaving the station, we
begin to espy the masts in the commercial basin,
and to get a distant glimpse of forts near which
we feel there is the sea. A wide-spread, white-
looking town, of irregular shape and build, is on
our left; and, plunging into it, we find ourselves
in Cherbourg, the only spot as yet where we
have had (be it said in passing) to show our
passport since Havre. What sort of place
Cherbourg is my reader shall hear pretty fully anon.

            ROYAL NAVAL VOLUNTEERS.

IT must often have struck our readers as
curious that the freest country in the world
should have retained till the other day one of the
oldest feudal engines of power. We allude to
the power of impressment, which lasted in the
navy long after the army had contrived to
dispense with it, and which, according to some
authorities, is still legal—however impracticable.
Impressment is, or was, based on the ancient
principle, that the obligations of war being
paramount, the king could compel men to serve
during a war. So far back as 1181, Henry the
Second commanded the justices-itinerant to
declare in each county that no one should induce
"any seamen to go out of England." The king
wanted them for himself, for the quaint old one-
masted galleys, busses, and dromons, which
constituted the early English navy. The right
claimed by Henry the Second was equally claimed,
six hundred years after, by George the Third.

The peculiar difficulty which forced our
sovereigns to exercise this right arose from our
peculiar maritime character. A soldier enlisted
to serve the crown has no other market but the
crown's to offer himself in. A sailor has always
had that mercantile marine which has
interchanged good offices with the navy from the first.
The merchant service has supplied men, the
navy has protected the merchant service.
Without each other they could not exist. We
are commercial because naval, and naval because
commercial. But the warlike nature of early
history also shows that the fighting element must
have been the earliest. The Viking roved for
roving's sake, fighting for fighting's sake as he went
along. In doing so, he learned the commercial
value of foreign communication, and there came
a generation which roved to trade. For a while
the fighting and trading elements combined—
the skipper carried arms to protect his venture.
But war grew scientific before trade did, and
asserted itself as the superior nautical power. If
England has acquired and kept colonies and
commerce, it has been because she has had a
strong arm to protect them, to open up channels