other before he has time to feel hot. But the
second is greeted with that tempered _empressement_ with which you bow
in the street to an acquaintance with whom you have met half an hour
before; the third is a stale repetition; the fourth is decidedly one too
many, and the fifth is sensibly exasperating. The _fonds_, in a word,
are very tiresome. It was, if I remember rightly, in the bottom of the
last and widest of the series that I discovered the little town of
Yport. Every little fishing village on the Norman coast has, within the
last ten years, set up in business as a watering-place; and, though one
might fancy that Nature had condemned Yport to modest obscurity, it is
plain that she has no idea of being out of the fashion. But she is a
miniature imitation of her rivals. She has a meagre little wood behind
her and an evil-smelling beach, on which bathing is possible only at the
highest tide. At the scorching mid-day hour at which I inspected her she
seemed absolutely empty, and the ocean, beyond acres of slippery
seaweed, looked very far away. She has everything that a properly
appointed _station de bains_ should have, but everything is on a
Lilliputian scale. The whole place looked like a huge Nueremburg toy.
There is a diminutive hotel, in which, properly, the head waiter should
be a pigmy and the chambermaid a sprite, and beside it there is a
_Casino_ on the smallest possible scale. Everything about the _Casino_
is so harmoniously undersized that it seems a matter of course that the
newspapers in the reading-room should be printed in the very finest
type. Of course there is a reading-room, and a dancing-room, and a
_cafe_, and a billiard-room, with a bagatelle board instead of a table,
and a little terrace on which you may walk up and down with very short
steps. I hope the prices are as tiny as everything else, and I suspect,
indeed, that Yport honestly claims, not that she is attractive, but that
she is cheap.

I toiled up the perpendicular cliff again, and took my way over the
grass, for another hour, to Fecamp, where I found the peculiarities of
Yport directly reversed. The place is a huge, straggling village, seated
along a wide, shallow bay, and adorned, of course, with the classic
_Casino_ and the row of hotels. But all this is on a very brave scale,
though it is not manifest that the bravery of Fecamp has won a victory;
and, indeed, the local attractions did not strike me as irresistible. A
pebbly beach of