progress from the water back into your cabin,
form, as a general thing, the sum total of your peregrination. For the
rest you remain horizontal, contemplating the horizon. To mark the day
with a white stone, therefore, it was quite sufficient to stretch my
legs. So I climbed the huge grassy cliff which shuts in the little bay
on the right (as you lie on the beach, head upward), and gained the
bleak white chapel of Notre Dame de la Garde, which a lady told me she
was sure was the original of Matthew Arnold's "Little Gray Church on the
Windy Hill." This is very likely; but the little church to-day was not
gray; neither was the hill windy.

I had occasion, by the time I reached the summit, to wish it had been.
Deep, silent sunshine filled the air, and the long grass of the downs
stood up in the light without a tremor. The downs at Etretal are
magnificent, and the way they stretched off toward Dieppe, with their
shining levels and their faintly-shaded dells, was in itself an
irresistible invitation. On the land side they have been somewhat
narrowed by cultivation; the woods, and farms, and grain fields here and
there creep close enough to the edge of the cliff almost to see the
shifting of the tides at its base. But cultivation in Normandy is itself
picturesque, and the pedestrian rarely need resent its encroachments.
Neither walls nor hedges or fences are anywhere visible; the whole land
lies open to the breezes and to his curious footsteps. This universal
absence of barriers gives an air of vastness to the landscape, so that
really, in a little French province, you have more of the feeling of
being in a big country than on our own huge continent, which bristles so
unconsciously with prohibitory rails and stone-piles. Norman farmhouses,
too, with their mossy roofs and their visible beams making all kinds of
triangles upon the ancient plaster of their walls, are very delightful
things. Hereabouts they have always a dark little wood close beside
them; often a _chenaie_, as the term is--a fantastic little grove of
tempest-tossed oaks. The trees look as if, some night, when the
sea-blasts were howling their loudest and their boughs were tossing
most wildly, the tumult had suddenly been stilled and they had stopped
short, each in the attitude into which the storm was twisting it. The
only thing the storm can do with them now is to blow them straight. The
long, indented coast line had never seemed to me so charming. It
stretche