FROM PARIS TO CHELMSFORD.

FROM the Seine to the Chelm— from
imperial Paris to a little county town in rural,
calf-fattening, corn-growing, fox-hunting
Essex is a long stride. Yet we took such a
stride the other day, and not without making
notes. We have compared the two places;
and, strange as it may sound, rural Chelmsford
had not the worst of the comparison in
what the French would call the spécialité
that caused our journey.

The palace of the Champs Elysées at
Paris was turned, the other day, into a
palace of agricultural industry, and all the
world was invited in the most flattering
terms to send to it the best specimens of
cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry; and the most
ingenious implements for cultivating, sowing,
gathering, and realising the fruits of a farm.
This invitation was no hollow compliment,
but was accompanied with terms of Imperial
liberality: the barriers of customs' houses
were thrown open for the occasion, and every
beast and every machine presented at the
French frontier was duly armed with agricultural
passports, was entitled to a free passage
to Paris, to free board and lodging as long as
the Exhibition lasted, and to a return-ticket
to the frontier when it was over.

So handsome an invitation, coupled with
the prospect of prizes of money and medals
in astounding profusion, brought together such
a crowd of exhibitors as were never before
gathered, and probably never will be
assembled again. The herds and shepherds
were sufficient to constitute a language of
Babel. There were Danes and Schleswig-
Holsteiners, Dutch arid Saxons, Swiss and
Tyrolese, Austrians, Bavarians, Bohemians,
Gallicians and Hungarians; French patois
from Bretagne to Auvergne, from Flanders
to the Garonne, mixed with English
provincialism of every variety from Yorkshire
to Devonshire; with Highlander Scotch and
Lowlander Scotch; and all sorts of Irish to
be heard between Galway and Dublin Bay.
Moreover, two thousand animals were to
represent the beef, milk, cheese, mutton, wool,
pork sausages, and bristles of continental
Europe.

About the superiority of the decorative
part of the French Exhibition there was not
the slightest doubt. With a palace for a
cattle-yard, a nation's funds to draw upon,
and French taste to adorn, a picture was made
up worth the whole price of an opera-ticket—
even to those indifferent to the great food
question. Grass, flowers and shrubs all "a-
growing all a-blowing," fountains murmuring
into basins, where salmon, trout, carp,
perch, eels, and crayfish of gigantic size,
suggested cutlets, matelote à la marimère, and
potage à la bisque ; above, banners waving
with golden bees, stars, stripes, union-jacks,
crescents, crosses, eagles, single and double ;
below, all manner of horned beasts ; adding
to the sights the sounds of lowing and bleating
in many languages : now a blast from a Tyrolese
horn, then a bang-bang from the iron
kettles which in Switzerland pass for bells ;
while, sprinkled among an ebbing and flowing
crowd of visitors such as usually fill the
Boulevards on fine summer evenings, were
priest-like Bretonues with vast coal-scuttle
hats, close curly black hair, yellow oval visages,
and long black tunics ; Tyrolean dairy-men
with white stockings, green breeches, short
jackets, enormous calves, and steeple-crowned
hats ; Swiss ditto, in yellow leather dittos ;
French veal-breeders in blue blouses and
necklaces of prize medals ; and Hungarians
in hussar jackets and white linen Turkish
trousers. The Highlanders in Tartan kilts,
carried away the palm from all for
picturesqueness of costume, for strength and for
expression half-savage halt-soft, as Mr. Moore
once sang.

The Schleswigers— from whom we derive an
ancestry of Anglesmen, and who continue
famous for horses and butter— sent the
d'Angeln breed of small red cows; which, in a
way we need some patient historian to trace,
were transplanted, at some remote period, to
or from North Devon and to or from Saxony.
Not that the Schleswig full-uddered specimens
would produce any of the famous Devon
beef without three or four generations of
cultivation. Still, we see the relationship
in the same form and colour, moderated— by
constant domestic intercourse between the
herd and his cow, by good grass, and by warm
winter stables— into an expression very
different from the wild, curly-coated denizens
of the Quantock Hills, or the climbers of the
Exmoor combes. The d'Angeln are sadly