This charming ‘aphrodite piscatrix’ is stalwart and strong (she can swim a mile with ease), she has carried her basket and nets since sunrise, and now at eight o’clock on this summer’s morning sits down on the rocks, makes a quick breakfast of potage, plumes herself a little, and commences knitting.  She does not stay long on the beach, but before leaving, makes a slight acquaintance with the strangers, and evinces a curious desire to hear anything they may have to tell her about the great world.

It is too bright a picture to last; she too, it would seem, has day-dreams of cities; she would give up her freedom, she would join the crowd and enter the ‘great city,’ she would have a stall at ’les halles,’ and see the world.  Day-dreams, but too often fulfilled—­the old story of centralization doing its work; look at the map of Normandy, and see how the ‘chemin de fer de l’Ouest’ is putting forth its arms, which—­like the devil-fish, in Victor Hugo’s ’Travailleurs de la Mer’—­will one day draw irresistibly to itself, our fair ’Toiler of the sea.’[26]

‘What does Monsieur think?’ (for we are favoured with a little confidence from our young friend), and what can we say?  Could we draw a tempting picture of life in cities—­could we, if we had the heart, draw a favourable contrast between her life, as we see it, and the lives of girls of her own age, who live in towns—­who never see the breaking of a spring morning, or know the beauty of a summer’s night?  Could we picture to her (if we would) the gloom that shrouds the dwellings of many of her northern sisters; and could she but see the veil that hangs over London, in such streets as Harley, or Welbeck Street, on the brightest morning that ever dawned on their sleeping inhabitants, she might well be reconciled to her present life!

[Illustration:  A TOILER OF THE SEA.]

‘Is it nothing,’ we are inclined to ask her, ’to feel the first rays of the sun at his rising, to be fanned with fresh breezes, to rejoice in the wind, to brave the storm; to have learned from childhood to welcome as familiar friends, the changes of the elements, and, in short, to have realised, in a natural life the ‘mens sana in corpore sano’?  Would she be willing to repeat the follies of her ancestors in the days of the Trianon and Louis XIV.?  Would she complete the fall which began when knights and nobles turned courtiers—­and roues?  Let us read history to her and remind her what centralization did for old France; let us whisper to her, whilst there is time, what Paris is like in our own day.

Do we exaggerate the evils of over-centralization?  We only at present, half know them; but the next generation may discover the full meaning of the word.  There is exaggeration, no doubt; some men have lived so long in the country that they speak of towns as a ’seething mass of corruption,’ pregnant of evil; and of villages as of an almost divine Arcadia, whence nothing but good can spring; but the evils of centralization can scarcely be overrated in any community.  The social system even in France, cannot revolve for ever round one sun.