CALAIS. THE BLACK PRINCE. — ÉTRETAT. — FRENCH BATHING .— Legend.
STORY OF ST. Louis. — STORY OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW's Eve.

T

HE Class stopped briefly at Calais, and was disappointed to find a city so famous in history situated in a barren district, and surrounded with little that is picturesque. The old walls around the town are, however, pleasant promenades, and command a view of the white cliffs of England. It was here, after a siege of eleven months, that Eustace de St. Pierre and his five companions offered themselves to Edward III. as a ransom for the city, and were saved from death by the pleading of Queen Philippa. The town was a fortress then, and looked menacingly over to England. The English proudly held possession of it for more than two hundred years, or from 1347 to 1558, when it was captured in Bloody Mary's time by the French under the Duc de Guise.

"When I am dead," said Mary in her last days, "and my body is opened, ye shall find Calais written on my heart."

Calais recalls the stories of valor of the chivalrous campaigns of Edward III. and his son, the Black Prince, in Normandy. At Crecy, the Black Prince, when only sixteen years of age, led the English army to victory, and slew the King of Bohemia with his own hand.

King Edward watched this battle from a windmill on a hill. The French army was many times larger than the English. The Prince during the battle found himself hard pressed, and at one point the arl of Warwick sent to the king for assistance.

Then," said the king, "I shall send no aid. I have set my heart upon his proving himself a brave knight, and I am resolved that the victory shall be due to his own valor."

In 1356, in another campaign in Normandy, the Black Prince won a most brilliant victory at Poitiers, and captured the French King John. The latter was a brave soldier, and fought with his battle-axe until all

the nobles had forsaken him. The Black Prince made a supper for him in his tent in the evening, and waited upon him at the table with his own hands. The Black Prince and the captive king rode through London together, the former in great pomp, and the latter on a creamcolored pony by his side. All of these things read prettily in history, but one is glad that the time is past when war was the game of kings, and armies were used as their playthings.

A series of easy rides near the cool sea brought the Class to the old fishing village of Étretat, now a fashionable summer resort for French artists, and a popular bathing-place for those desiring seclusion amid the coast scenery. It is situated amid rocks which the sea has excavated into arches, aiguilles, and other fantastic recesses and caverns. Its pretty châlets and villas on the hills, its gayly-dressed summer idlers, its groups of fishermen who are to be seen in all weathers, its handsome fisher girls bronzed by the sun who lead a free life by the sea, its bathers in brilliant dresses of blue serge and bright trimmings, its bracing air and usually fine weather, make it one of the quaintest and most restful nooks in France.

There are the remains of a Norman church near the sea. It is said to occupy the spot where the people watched the great flotilla of William the Conqueror drift to St. Valery, there to take the Norman army to England.

A French watering-place is quite different from an American seaside resort. You have your board and sleeping-room in one of the hotels, but your parlors, piazzas, and places of recreation are in an elegant pleasure house, called the Casino. For the privileges of the Casino you pay a small sum; at Etretat it amounts to about ten dollars a month. The billiard-rooms, ball-room, and the rooms for general conversation are in the Casino.

Every one bathes in the sea at Étretat, women and children, whole families together, and most of the girls are expert swimmers. It is delightful to sit upon the shingle, as the pebbly beach is called, and

watch the sport in the sun-bright mornings or golden and dreamy afternoons. The costumes of the bathers are so pretty that the scene seems like a ball in the sea. Bathing men are stationed here and there to render any needed assistance.

The great caverns which the sea has worn in the rocks at Étretat remind one of the ruins of immense cathedrals, and are grand indeed in the light of the full summer moon.

The place abounds with story-telling fishermen. The Class was told one story here which is worthy of a poem.

"A beautiful stream once watered the valley. Its bed may still be seen, but it now runs under ground. On the stream an industrious miller built his mill and did a

thriving business. One day
a woman, sick and destitute,
came to him for help. He
turned heartlessly away from
her with abuse.
The poor
creature raised her withered

"To-morrow thou shalt have thy reward.'

"When the miller awoke the next morning he found his mill standing on dry ground. The river had gone down into the earth, where it still runs."

The fisher's hymn which Ernest Wynn gave the Club at its first meeting was asked for here by Master Lewis, and was procured. It is sung be

fore the departure of ships and during great storms in the fishing season, being a part of the mass for seamen, or the messe d'equi page.

The Class left Etretat for Rouen.

"O Rouen! Rouen! it is here I must die, and here shall be my last resting-place!" said Joan of Arc at the stake. Rouen was hardly the resting-place of the heroic peasant girl, for her ashes were thrown into the Seine. But the thought of the stranger on coming to Rouen is less associated with its history under the sea-kings of the North, the

Norman dukes and the English invaders, than with the hard fate and the public memorials of the simple shepherdess, who seems to have been called from her flocks to change the destiny of France.

The Class entered Rouen after a series of short, zigzag journeys, partly in coaches and partly on foot, going leisurely from town to town through roads that presented to view continuous landscapes of shining orchards, ripening gardens, and resplendent poppy-fields; stopping at