We

picture of Joan of Arc? He has dressed the Maid, in her orchard at Domrémy, in the very garb which you may see to-day (half) covering, every village girl in France-a low (dirty) white bodice over a slate-grey skirt, worsted stockings, and sabots. These peasants bring home to one the continuity of the race. townspeople have abandoned armour for velvet, and velvet for wig and knee-breeches, and wig and kneebreeches for top-hat and frock-coat. But the French villager has not modified a single detail of his costume. The mere sight of him is a sort of archæological debauch. One of Mr. George Moore's people in "Evelyn Innes cannot visit Paris without thinking of Balzac. For my part, I cannot dissociate Normandy from Froissart. feel inclined to interlard my conversation with "Oncques ne vis" and "ores chevaucha" and "moult."

I

And so it seems quite natural to me to find myself reading this inscription:

Ci gist haut et puissant seigneur Nicole sires D'Estouteville, lequel en son vivat fonda cette pnte

Abbaye en l'an de grace 1116, et trépassa le xxii
Jour d'Avril Mil Cent et xl.

It is on a tomb in the Abbey of Valmont, some few
miles inland from Fécamp-Fécamp, as "Charley's
Aunt" would say, "where the Benedictine comes from."
And Valmont itself was a Benedictine establishment.
The abbey appears to have been once sacked by the
English-but, for that matter, there is not a dilapidation

in all Normandy that is not put down by the natives to the English. In any case, the ruins one sees now cannot be the result of any English sacking, for they are obviously Renaissance, and cannot date further back than the close of the fifteenth century.

Ruined abbeys are common enough. What is uncommon is to find, in the midst of ruins, a chapel preserved intact. And that is the surprise reserved for you at Valmont. You wander down a nave flanked by broken ivy-clad columns, with the aisles here and there roughly boarded in, so as to serve as stables. Everything seems dead and deserted. Then a door is unlocked-and you are suddenly plunged into a stream of multi-coloured light pouring down from stained glass upon figures in marble and alabaster as clear in outline and crisp to the touch as though they had been carved yesterday.

This little chapel of Valmont is a masterpiece of delicate grace, of something like feminine coquetry in architecture. Its chief jewel is the altar-piece-attributed by tradition to Germain Pilon-which gives you in stone the Renaissance idea of the Assumption. The Virgin is on her knees with hands joined on a book which she has just been reading. The Archangel Gabriel-with true French gallantry-is on his knees But the choicest thing is the background, with its canopied bedstead, its high, elaborate chimney-piece, and its carpenter's bench-vice, tweezers, plane, shavings, and all. On the floor is the Virgin's work-basket, filled

too.

with balls of worsted. It is a charming "domestic interior."

On the altar itself is a gruesome relic—the heart of one of the D'Estoutevilles in a thin leaden covering moulded to its shape. They say that when this case was discovered beneath the floor of the chapel some years ago it had a fissure from which a sort of greyish-red powder was escaping. A D'Estouteville fell at Hastings. Somehow, that fact seems to make an English visitor seem quite at home in Valmont. The place boasts other attractions than the abbey—a`château (also “sacked by the English") and an ancient hostelry. On a hot August afternoon all the inhabitants seem asleep. Grass is growing in the market-place. The local "coiffeur " stands unoccupied at his shop-door, yawning and evidently marvelling at the energetic curiosity of the visitors. The town must be now pretty much what it was before the abbey and the château had been sacked by the English. For my part, I should scarcely be surprised to see Nicolas, Sire d'Estouteville, stalking across the market-place in full armour. As for the Dreyfus case, I don't believe a single inhabitant of Valmont has even heard of it.

Levanting

Crete. We glide silently, almost furtively, into Suda Bay at midnight, over an oil-smooth sea, and under a moon of burnished copper. The coast is merely a vague, dark mass, but here and there are bright splashes which a glass shows to be beacon fires, and we can plainly see the lights of Canea—a long, low line of them, not at all unlike the Margate lights as seen from the end of the jetty. At the farther end of the bay lies the fleet, every vessel outlined by electric lamps from stem to stern. Wish-h-h goes our signal rocket; it is answered from the fleet by another, which falls in a brilliant red shower, and I begin to think that the whole affair is one of Messrs. Brock's entertainments. Presently a steampinnace creeps out from the darkness, and describing a sharp curve, shoots neatly up alongside our gangway ; a young lieutenant steps on board with "British Navy" writ large all over him. After a brisk salute to the French officers of our steamer and a brief glance round for the captain, whom he fails to discover (for the

excellent reason that the captain has not chosen to leave the bridge), he says abruptly-addressing the world in general-"I want the mails." And he gets

them.

Also he gets something the British Navy had not bargained for-a lady with a maid, a pet dog, and six dress-boxes. Why this lady has come to Crete no one precisely knows; but she is a dashing sportswoman, and we all have a vague idea she is doing it for a wager. The lieutenant explains that there is absolutely no accommodation for a lady at Suda Bay, but our sportswoman nevertheless persuades him to land her. And so the British Navy, the steam-pinnace, the embarrassed lieutenant, the sportswoman, maid, dog, and dress-boxes vanish into the night, and we glide out of Suda Bay as silently as we stole in. The impression left on my mind by this midnight call is that Crete is only some fantastic dream, a Whistler Nocturne, or a Kinematograph without the music. But there is waking, solid reality in the fact (which we learn from the lieutenant) that the Turks have all been packed off. It is our first bit of news of the outer world since we left Marseilles.

Athens.-Twelve hours' steaming from Suda Bay brings us to the Piræus. But long before our arrival there, at a distance of some eight or nine miles, I should say-though distances in this marvellously clear atmosphere are generally much greater than one supposesI have been able through the white building on a low hill.

glass to make out a little That hill is the Acropolis