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 to be seen in it, never
measured 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 of 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 a-top,
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 at the fourth-floor
window, might conceive himself another Jack, alighting on enchanted
ground from another bean-stalk. It is a place wonderfully populous
in children; English children, with governesses reading novels as