II.

Lovely to a poet or an artist's eye is the unevenly-built and
picturesque square of Rouen in which the Cathedral stands,--lovely,
and suggestive of historical romance in all its remote corners, its
oddly-shaped houses, its by-ways and crooked little flights of steps
leading to nowhere, its gables and slanting roofs, and its utter
absence of all structural proportion. A shrine here, a broken statue
there,--a half-obliterated coat-of-arms over an old gateway,--a
rusty sconce fitted fast into the wall to support a lantern no
longer needed in these days of gas and electricity,--an ancient
fountain overgrown with weed, or a projecting vessel of stone for
holy water, in which small birds bathe and disport themselves after
a shower of rain,--those are but a few of the curious fragments of a
past time which make the old place interesting to the student, and
more than fascinating to the thinker and dreamer. The wonderful
"Hotel Bourgtheroulde," dating from the time of Francis the First,
and bearing on its sculptured walls the story of the Field of the
Cloth of Gold, in company with the strangely-contrasting
"Allegories", from Petrarch's "Triumphs", is enough in itself to
keep the mind engrossed with fanciful musings for an hour. How did
Petrarch and the Field of the Cloth of Gold come together in the
brain of the sculptor who long ago worked at these ancient bas-
reliefs? One wonders, but the wonder is in vain,--there is no
explanation;--and the "Bourgtheroulde" remains a pleasing and
fantastic architectural mystery. Close by, through the quaint old
streets of the Epicerie and "Gross Horloge", walked no doubt in
their young days the brothers Corneille, before they evolved from
their meditative souls the sombre and heavy genius of French
tragedy,--and not very far away, up one of those little shadowy