has a varied and beautiful country around it
and many characteristic and agreeable things
within it. To be sure, it might have fewer
bad smells and less decaying refuse, and it
might be better drained , and much cleaner
in many parts, and therefore infinitely more
healthy. Still, it is a bright, airy, pleasant,
cheerful town; and if you were to walk down
either of its three well-paved main streets
towards five o'clock in the afternoon, when
delicate odours of cookery fill the air, and its
hotel-windows (it is full of hotels) give
glimpses of long tables set out for dinner, and
made to look sumptuous by the aid of napkins
folded fan-wise, you would rightly judge
it to be an uncommonly good town to eat
and drink in.

We have an old walled town, rich in cool
public wells of water, on the top of a hill
within and above the present business-town;
and if it were some hundreds of miles further
from England, instead of being, on a clear
day, within sight of the grass growing in the
crevices of the chalk-cliffs of Dover, you
would long ago have been bored to death
about that town. It is more picturesque and
quaint than half the innocent places which
tourists, following their leader like sheep,
have made impostors of. To say nothing
of its houses with grave courtyards, its
queer by-corners, and its many-windowed
streets white and quiet in the sunlight,
there is an ancient belfry in it that would have
been in all the Annuals and Albums, going
and gone, these hundred years, if it had but
been more expensive to get at. Happily it
has escaped so well, being only in our French
watering-place, that you may like it of your
own accord in a natural manner, without
being required to go into convulsions about it.
We regard it as one of the later blessings of
our life, that BILKINS, the only authority on
Taste, never took any notice that we can find
out, of our French watering place. Bilkins
never wrote about it, never pointed out
anything in it, always left it alone. For which
relief, Heaven bless the town and the memory
of the immortal Bilkins likewise!

There is a charming walk, arched and
shaded by trees, on the old walls that form
the four sides if this High Town, whence you
get glimpses of the streets below, and changing
views of the other town and of the river,
and of the hills and of the sea. It is made
more agreeable and peculiar by some of the
solemn houses that are rooted in the deep
streets below, bursting into a fresher existence
atop, and having doors and windows, and
even gardens, on these ramparts. A child
going in at the courtyard gate of one of
these houses, climbing up the many stairs,
and coming out of the fourth-floor window,
might conceive himself another Jack, alighting
on enchanted ground from another
beanstalk. It is a place wonderfully populous in
children; English children, with governesses
reading novels as they walk down the shady
lanes of trees, or nursemaids interchanging
gossip on the seats; French children with
their smiling bonnes in snow-white caps, and
themselves—if little boys—in straw head-
gear like bee-hives, work-baskets, and church-
hassocks. Three years ago, there were three
weazen old men, one bearing a frayed red ribbon
in his threadbare button-hole, always to be
found walking together among these children,
before dinner-time. If they walked for an appetite,
they doubtless lived en pension—were
contracted for—otherwise their poverty would
have made it a rash action. They were stooping,
blear-eyed, dull old men, slip-shod and
shabby, in long-skirted short-waisted coats
and meagre trousers, and yet with a ghost of
gentility hovering in their company. They
spoke little to each other, and looked as if
they might have been politically discontented
if they had had vitality enough. Once, we
overheard red-ribbon feebly complain to the
other two that somebody, or something, was
"a Robber"; and then they all three set
their mouths so that they would have ground
their teeth if they had had any. The ensuing
winter gathered red-ribbon unto the great
company of faded ribbons, and next year the
remaining two were there—getting themselves
entangled with hoops and dolls—familiar
mysteries to the children—probably in the
eyes of most of them, harmless creatures
who had never been like children, and whom
children could never be like. Another winter
came, and another old man went, and so, this
present year, the last of the triumvirate left
off walking—it was no good, now—and sat by
himself on a little solitary bench, with the hoops
and the dolls as lively as ever, all about him.

In the Place d'Armes of this town, a little
decayed market is held, which seems to slip
through the old gateway, like water, and go
rippling down the hill, to mingle with the
murmuring market in the lower town, and
get lost in its movement and bustle. It is
very agreeable on an idle summer morning
to pursue this market-stream from the hill-
top. It begins dozingly and dully, with a
few sacks of corn; starts into a surprising
collection of boots and shoes; goes brawling
down the hill in a diversified channel of old
cordage, old iron, old crockery, old clothes
civil and military, old rags, new cotton goods,
flaming prints of saints, little looking-glasses,
and incalculable lengths of tape; dives into a
backway, keeping out of sight for a little while,
as streams will, or only sparkling for a moment
in the shape of a market drinking-shop; and
suddenly reappears behind the great church,
shooting itself into a bright confusion of
white-capped women and blue-bloused men,
poultry, vegetables, fruits, flowers, pots, pans,
praying-chairs, soldiers, country butter,
umbrellas and other sun-shades, girl-porters
waiting to be hired with baskets at their
backs, and one weazen little old man in a
cocked hat, wearing a cuirass of drinking-