They found him two leagues from the farm, tied hand and foot, half dead
with rage, his gun broken, his trousers turned inside out, and with three
dead hares hanging round his neck, and a placard on his chest with these
words: "Who goes on the chase loses his place."

In later years, when he used to tell this story of his wedding night, he
usually added: "Ah! as far as a joke went it was a good joke. They caught
me in a snare, as if I had been a rabbit, the dirty brutes, and they
shoved my head into a bag. But if I can only catch them some day they had
better look out for themselves!"

That is how they amuse themselves in Normandy on a wedding day.




FATHER MATTHEW

We had just left Rouen and were galloping along the road to Jumieges. The
light carriage flew along across the level country. Presently the horse
slackened his pace to walk up the hill of Cantelen.

One sees there one of the most magnificent views in the world. Behind us
lay Rouen, the city of churches, with its Gothic belfries, sculptured
like ivory trinkets; before us Saint Sever, the manufacturing suburb,
whose thousands of smoking chimneys rise amid the expanse of sky,
opposite the thousand sacred steeples of the old city.

On the one hand the spire of the cathedral, the highest of human
monuments, on the other the engine of the power-house, its rival, and