as a hill-fort. The hill is of no extraordinary height; but
it is thoroughly isolated, not forming part of a range like the hills of
Avranches and Le Mans. And, saving the open place before the
cathedral--perhaps the forum of Constantia--there is not a flat yard of
ground in Coutances. The church itself is on a slope; you walk up the
incline of one street and see the houses sloping down the incline of the
other. In the valley on the west side of the city is a singular
curiosity, several of the arches of a mediaeval aqueduct.[31] Pointed
arches, and buttresses against the piers, are what we are not used to in
such buildings. A road by a few small churches leads to Granville on its
peninsula, with its strange church where Flamboyant and _Renaissance_
die away into a kind of Romanesque most unlike that of Ragusa, and the
Cotentin has been gone through from north to south. The modern
department and the modern diocese go on further; but the "pagus
Constantinus" is now done with; the land of Avranches, the march against
the Breton, has a history of its own.

THE AVRANCHIN

1876

The town of Avranches is well known as one of those Continental spots on
which Englishmen have settled down and formed a kind of little colony. A
colony of this kind has two aspects in the eyes of the traveller who
lights upon it. On the one hand, it is a nuisance to find one's self, on
sitting down to a _table-d'hote_ in a foreign town, in the middle of
ordinary English chatter. Full of the particular part of the world in
which he is, the traveller may hear all parts of the world discussed
from some purely personal or professional aspect, without a single
original observation to add anything to his stock of ideas. On the other
hand, it must be allowed that the presence of an English settlement
anywhere always brings with it a degree of civilisation in many points
such as is not always found in towns of much greater size which our
countrymen do not frequent. But to the historical traveller Avranches is
almost dead. A few stones heaped together are all that remains of the
cathedral, and another stone marks the sight of the north door where
Henry the Second received absolution for his share in the murder of
Thomas. The city which formed the halting-place of Lanfranc on his way
from Pavia to Bec is now chiefly to be noticed for its splendid site,
and as a convenient starting-point for other places where more has been
spared. Avranches, like Co