nd where his host asks special payment for wine,
but supplies "zider" for nothing. But above all things, look at the men.
Those broad shoulders and open countenances seem to have got on the
wrong side of the Channel. You are almost surprised at hearing anything
but your own tongue come out of their mouths. It seems strange to hear
such lips talking French; but it is something to think that it is at
least not the French of Louis the Great or of Louis Napoleon, but the
tongue of the men who first dictated the Great Charter, and who wrung
its final confirmation from the greatest of England's later kings.

The truth is, that between the Englishman and the Norman--at least, the
Norman of the Bessin--there can be, in point of blood, very little
difference. One sees that there must be something in ethnological
theories, after all. The good seed planted by the old Saxon and Danish
colonists, and watered in aftertimes by Henry the Fifth and John, Duke
of Bedford, is still there.[7] It has not been altogether choked by the
tares of Paris. The word "Saxon" is so vague that we cannot pretend to
say exactly who the Saxons of Bayeux were; but Saxons of some sort were
there, even before another Teutonic wave came in with Rolf Ganger and
his Northmen. Bayeux, as we have said, was the Scandinavian stronghold.
Men spoke Danish there when not a word of Danish was understood at
Rouen. Men there still ate their horse-steaks, and prayed to Thor and
Odin, while all Rouen bowed piously at the altar of Notre-Dame. The
ethnical elements of a Norman of the Bessin and an Englishman of Norfolk
or Lincolnshire must be as nearly as possible the same. The only
difference is, that one has quite forgotten his Teutonic speech, and the
other only partially. Not that all Teutonic traces have gone even from
the less Norman parts of Normandy. How many of the English travellers
who land at Dieppe stop to think that the name of that port, disguised
as it is by a French spelling, is nothing in the world but "The Deeps?"
If any one, now that there is a railway, prefers to go along the lovely
valley of the Seine, he will come to the little town of Caudebec. Here,
again, the French spelling makes the word meaningless; but only write it
"Cauld beck," and it at once tells its story to a Lowland Scot, and
ought to do so to every "Anglo-Saxon" of any kind. As for the local
dialect, it is French. It is not, like that of Aquitaine and Provence, a
language as distinct as