life-blood traverses the Canal de la Colme,
and is finally poured out at Dunkerque; a
smaller portion is transfused close by to supply
the necessities of Ardruick and Calais. But
the main arterial stream proceeds straight
forwards finding, with some difficulty, an
outlet at Gravelines. If it were not for strong
and solid flood-gates, that are opened and
shut at every tide, the usual course of things
would be reversed. Instead of the river
running into the sea, the sea would be for ever
running into the river, till it had got
possession of the Itian Gulf again.

Gravelines! Dear, dull, delightful old
town! "If you want to go to the sink of the
earth," an unpoetical friend said to me one
day, "you have only to travel as far as Gravelines.
If a man has committed any crime,
short of murder, he will be sufficiently
punished by being transported for three
months to Gravelines. The soldiers who are
sent to Gravelines suicide themselves on their
way thither. Of all dull holes in the world,
Gravelines is the double-dullest." Who, with
an ordinary amount of perverseness, could
resist visiting such a tempting spot as that?
Not I, for one, at least. To Gravelines I
went. There I made a purchase of the
principal "Boot and choe meker" of the town,
whose display of learning may be accounted
for by the fact that a place with more than
five thousand inhabitants, cannot boast of a
single bookseller's shop. The nearest approach
to any Temple of the Muses is a circulating
library, where groceries are also vended. At
one counter you may hire a heart-stirring
novel, and at the other buy the tallow dip
which is to enable you to peruse it at night.
The country about Gravelines is excessively
flat. If it be not the flattest in the world, I
do not know where you will find a flatter.
Most plains have a gentle and perceptible
undulation; but the neighbourhood of the
lower Aa is as level as a lake of quicksilver.
Water runs there, not because it feels in
itself any tendency to move, but because
other water is pushing it behind. You have
visible proof that the earth is a globe, by
seeing a church spire, which you left ever so
long ago, peeping half above the edge of the
horizon, like a distant ship far out at sea.
After I had been walking for leagues over
this interminable billiard table, a friendly
native undertook to do me the honours of his
paradise. Oh no! he said, this was not
marsh. Stagnant ditches and pollard willows
were, nevertheless, conspicuously abundant.
And then, again, it was rich, rich, rich! The
flax, and hemp, and wheat, and escourgeon,
(four-rowed barley, in patois "sucreon"), and
colza, and beans! His country was very,
very rich; rich like everything.

"Yes," said I a little out of temper, "it is
rich like everything, and flat like everything.
Of all the flat places I have ever seen"—

"You are right!" he answered proudly;
"it is really flat. It is the most beautiful
country that can possibly exist. Tiens! tiens!
Look at our roads, look at our pastures, look
at our soil, look at our crops. Oh no, this is
not marsh!"

Those are the sort of observations you will
get, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, if you
talk to a Frenchman about the beauty of any
country. The scenes which delight an
English tourist, have but feeble charms in
the eyes of the French in general. They look,
and yawn, and then turn their heads aside,
with "Bah oui!" It is an accidented
country, not a beautiful one. By a beau pays,
a Frenchman understands a dull, fertile,
monotonous district. This Beautiful is
irrevocably divorced from the Sublime.
Norway and Switzerland are, with him, in
general, the reverse of beau; while portions
of the Cotentin (a nook in the west of
Normandy) fill his enthusiastic mouth with notes
of admiration. His most admired landscapes
might be taken for bits cut out of Holland,
or Norfolk marshes out on a continental tour.
Beautiful, certainly, in their way. Abundance
is unquestionably beau, even if it involves
an abundance of eels and frogs. The principal
scarcity in such beautiful sites, is a
sufficient supply of good and drinkable water.
Rain-water preserved in cisterns is the best
they have to offer you; and even that
uninviting beverage occasionally runs short.

It sounds like a paradox to state that an
extensive district, lying in great measure
below high-water mark, should be safer from
occasional inundations than many spots of
higher ground. But there is such a network
of canals, egouts, watergands, and ditches,
crossing and running parallel to each other
at various levels, with so serviceable an
apparatus of locks and floodgates distributed over
so vast a surface, that one portion of the
aquatic labyrinth is made to ease another
which happens to be too hardly pressed, and
serious or long-continued inconvenience but
seldom occurs. Curious problems in hydrology
(or the watery art) are here often to be
seen ingeniously solved. Two streams run
across each other at slightly different
elevations; yet both contrive to flow on their
course, without intermingling with, or flooding
each other. A syphon conducts the more
depressed brook under the bed of the upper
rivière; and a lock placed at the point of
crossing provides the means of boat communication.
Another marvel is the Pont sans
pareil, or Unparalleled Bridge, built in 1752,
and still an admirable work of utility. It is
a hemispherical dome of stone, in which four
opposite openings are pierced, to allow four
canals to form a junction beneath it. Four
cross roads meet in the centre above, leading
to diverse localities of the lower basin of the
Aa. The Chemin de Fer du Nord grazes
the foot of this remarkable construction;
but the way to see as little as possible of
a foreign country, is, to travel through it by
railway.