inhabitants, as Normandy. The wooded hills and dales, the frequent
copses and apple orchards, the numerous thriving towns and villages, the
towers and steeples half hidden among the trees, recall at every step
the very similar scenery of our own beautiful and fruitful Devonshire.
And as the land is, so are the people. Ages ago, about the same time
that the Anglo-Saxon invaders first settled down in England, a band of
similar English pirates, from the old common English home by the
cranberry marshes of the Baltic, drove their long ships upon the long
rocky peninsula of the Cotentin, which juts out, like a French Cornwall,
from the mainland of Normandy up to the steep cliffs and beetling crags
of busy Cherbourg. There they built themselves little hamlets and
villages of true English type, whose very names to this day remind one
of their ancient Saxon origin. Later on, the Danes or Northmen conquered
the country, which they called after their own name, Normandy, that is
to say, the Northmen's land.

Mixing with the early Saxon or English settlers, and with the still more
primitive Celtic inhabitants, the Northmen founded a race extremely like
that which now inhabits our own country. To this day, the Norman
peasants of the Cotentin retain many marks of their origin and their
half-forgotten kinship with the English race. While other Frenchmen are
generally dark and thick-set, the Norman is, as a rule, a tall, fair-
haired, blue-eyed man, not unlike in build to our Yarmouth fisherman, or
our Kentish labourers. In body and mind, there is something about him
even now which makes him seem more nearly akin to us than the true
Frenchmen who inhabit almost all the rest of France.

In the village of Gruchy, near Greville, in this wild and beautiful
region of the Cotentin, there lived at the beginning of the present
century a sturdy peasant family of the name of Millet. The father of the