I am not contending for the superiority of everything English, but would not disguise from myself or my readers the fact of the greater humanity and consideration that prevail in the mother country.  Things here are yet in the green, but I trust there is no good reason to doubt that our fruit will mellow and ripen in time like the rest.

III.  A GLIMPSE OF FRANCE

In coming over to France, I noticed that the chalk-hills, which were stopped so abruptly by the sea on the British side of the Channel, began again on the French side, only they had lost their smooth, pastoral character, and were more broken and rocky, and that they continued all the way to Paris, walling in the Seine, and giving the prevailing tone and hue to the country,—­scrape away the green and brown epidermis of the hills anywhere, and out shines their white framework,—­and that Paris itself was built of stone evidently quarried from this formation,—­a light, cream-colored stone, so soft that rifle-bullets bury themselves in it nearly their own depth, thus pitting some of the more exposed fronts during the recent strife in a very noticeable manner, and which, in building, is put up in the rough, all the carving, sculpturing, and finishing being done after the blocks are in position in the wall.

Disregarding the counsel of friends, I braved the Channel at one of its wider points, taking the vixen by the waist instead of by the neck, and found her as placid as a lake, as I did also on my return a week later.

It was a bright October morning as we steamed into the little harbor at Dieppe, and the first scene that met my eye was, I suppose, a characteristic one,—­four or five old men and women towing a vessel into a dock.  They bent beneath the rope that passed from shoulder to shoulder, and tugged away doggedly at it, the women apparently more than able to do their part.  There is no equalizer of the sexes like poverty and misery, and then it very often happens that the gray mare proves the better horse.  Throughout the agricultural regions, as we passed along, the men apparently all wore petticoats; at least, the petticoats were the most active and prominent in the field occupations.  Then wearers were digging potatoes, pulling beets, following the harrow (in one instance a thorn-bush drawn by a cow), and stirring the wet, new-mown grass.  I believe the pantaloons were doing the mowing.  But I looked in vain for any Maud Mullers in the meadows, and have concluded that these can be found only in New England hay-fields!  And herein is one of the first surprises that await one on visiting the Old World countries,—­the absence of graceful, girlish figures, and bright girlish faces, among the peasantry or rural population.  In France I certainly expected to see female beauty everywhere, but did not get one gleam all that sunny day till I got to Paris.  Is it a plant that flourishes only in cities on this side of the Atlantic, or do all the pretty girls, as soon as they are grown, pack their trunks, and leave for the gay metropolis?