le the northern or English shore has been,
for many centuries, all the time enticing the seaman in and out over
the calm, deep, and sheltered waters which there penetrate the land, the
southern side has been an almost impassable barrier, consisting of a
long line of frowning cliffs, with every opening through it choked with
shoals and sand-banks, and guarded by the rolling and tumbling of surges
which scarcely ever rest.

It is in a great measure owing to these great physical differences
between the two shores, that the people who live upon the one side,
though of the same stock and origin with those who live upon the other,
have become so vastly superior to them in respect to naval exploits and
power. They are really of the same stock and origin, since both England
and the northern part of France were overrun and settled by what is
called the Scandinavian race, that is, people from Norway, Denmark, and
other countries on the Baltic. These people were called the _Northmen_
in the histories of those times. Those who landed in England are
generally termed _Danes_, though but a small portion of them came really
from Denmark. They were all, however, of the same parent stock, and
possessed the same qualities of courage, energy, and fearless love of
adventure and of danger which distinguish their descendants at the
present day. They came down in those early times in great military
hordes, and in fleets of piratical ships, through the German Ocean and
the various British seas, braving every hardship and every imaginable
danger, to find new regions to dwell in, more genial, and fertile, and
rich than their own native northern climes. In these days they evince
the same energy, and endure equal privations and hardships, in hunting
whales in the Pacific Ocean; in overrunning India, and seizing its
sources of wealth and power; or in sallying forth, whole fleets of
adventurers at a time, to go more than half round the globe, to dig for
gold in California. The times and circumstances have changed, but the
race and spirit are the same.

Normandy takes its name from the Northmen. It was the province of France
which the Northmen made peculiarly their own. They gained access to it
from the sea by the River Seine, which, as will be seen from the map,
flows, as it were, through the heart of the country. The lower part of
this river, and the sea around its mouth, are much choked up with sand
and gravel, which the waves have been for ages w