To judge from the style of the hotels, Besancon is not visited by many English travellers; and yet it well repays a visit, providing those who care for such things with a full average of vaulted passages, and feudal gateways, and arcaded court-yards, with much less than the average of evil smell.  There are gates of all shapes and times—­Louis-Quatorze towers, and fortifications specially constructed under Vauban’s own eye; while the approach to the town, from the land side, is by a tunnel, cut through the live rock which forms a solid chord to the arc described by the course of the river Doubs.  This excavation, called appropriately the Porte Taillee, is attributed by the various inhabitants to pretty nearly all the famous emperors and kings who have lived from Julius Caesar to Louis XIV.:  it owes its origin, no doubt, to the construction of the aqueduct which formerly brought into the town the waters pouring out of the rock at Arcier, two leagues from Besancon, and was the work probably of M. Aurelius and L. Verus.  Local antiquaries assign the aqueduct to Agrippa, the son-in-law of Augustus, apparently for no better reason than because he built a similar work in Rome.  The arch of triumph[33] at the entrance to the upper town has been an inexhaustible subject of controversy for many generations of antiquaries, and up to the time of Dunod was generally attributed to Aurelian:  that historian, however, believed that its sculptures represented the education of Crispus, the son of Constantine, and that the name Chrysopolis, by which Besancon was very generally known in early times, was only a corruption of Crispopolis.  Earlier writers are in favour of the natural derivation of Chrysopolis, and assert that when the Senones lost their famous chief, the Brennus of Roman history, before Delphos, they built a town where Byzantium afterwards stood, and called it Bisantium and Chrysopolis, in memory of their city of those names at home.

The Hotel du Nord is a rambling old house, comfortable after French ideas of comfort, and rejoicing in an excellent cuisine; though it is true that on one occasion, at least, haricots verts a l’Anglaise meant a mass of fibrous greens, swimming in a most un-English sea of artificial fat.  It is a good place for studying the natural manners of the untravelled Frenchman, who there sits patiently at the table, for many minutes before dinner is served, with his napkin tucked in round his neck, and his countenance composed into a look of much resignation.  The waiters are for the most part shock-headed boys, in angular-tail coats well up in the back of the neck, who frankly confess, when any order out of the common run of orders is given, that a German patois from the left bank of the Rhine is their only extensive language.  One of these won my eternal gratitude by providing a clean fork at a crisis between the last savouries and the plat doux; for the usual practice with the waiters, when anyone neglected to secure his knife