illieres passed back again to its old
use as the border defence of Normandy.

With such a history as this, and with a site so well suited to the
history, one could wish that there was more at Tillieres to describe
than there actually is. We should be best pleased of all if the castle
hill of Tillieres was still crowned with an ancient donjon; next to that
we should like to see it in the same case as Exmes or rather as
Almeneches. But the height is taken possession of by a house of much
more pretension than the harmless farm at Almeneches, and the passing
wayfarer can do little more than follow the outer wall of the castle--a
wall with work of endless dates--round a good part of its compass.
Looking down from the height, looking up from the village, best of all
perhaps from a point of the railway just west of the Tillieres station,
the general relations of castle, village, stream, and the once hostile
hills beyond, can be well taken in; but not much more than the general
relations. And the village has little to show beyond its church; and
there the Romanesque doorway is the choicest thing, as being part of our
chain of evidence. But it seems not to be on this ground that the church
of Tillieres is counted among "historic monuments," that is, forbidden
to be pulled about by any one else, but destined sooner or later, to be
pulled about by the national powers. Its qualification for admission
into this class seems to be the _Renaissance_ choir. On the outside this
is about as poor a jumble of bad Gothic and bad Italian as can well be
thought of; within it has a somewhat better effect with a vault and rich
pendants. Still they are nothing like so striking as those in Saint
Gervase at Falaise, which do really make us wonder how they are kept up.
More really interesting, perhaps, is the wooden roof of the nave,
evidently as great a feat as a French artist was capable of in the way
of wooden roofs. And an eye from Somerset looks kindly at this
outlandish attempt to make a kind of coved roof, and to paint it withal.
Such a one hopes that the French Republic will not turn diocesan
architect, and try to get rid of it. But he thinks that he could show
better coved roofs at home, and he wonders why, if the coved shaped was
chosen, a system of South-Saxon tie-beams and king-posts was thrust in
as well.

We turn to the other famous border-fortress of Verneuil. Here the
position, as a position, is in no way to be compared to that of