FRANCE UPON THE FRONTIER.

[FROM A CORRESPONDENT.)

TWO thousand Frenchmen from the Pas de Calais were brought

over the other day from Calais to the Crystal Palace, and restored to their homes on the self-same night. Our newspapers have commented in the regular stereotyped terms. We have been told how steam has annihilated distance, and how railroads are the true destroyers of international jealousies through their power of making each nation acquainted by travel with the other. I am not going through a love of paradox to dispute the truth of this orthodox belief in steam. But I wish to observe on a fact which a recent journey in an out-of-the-way nook of France forced upon my attention, namely, that steam as an international instructor teaches its lessons in a very spliiiiabdic and unsatisfactory manner. No doubt Englishmen know Paris, and Frenchmen London far better than they did in the pre•railroad era. For one foreign tra- veller to the two capitals we have now hundreds, if not thousands. But still I may be permitted to doubt whether these travellers know as much about France and England as their unenlightened predecessors. I cannot but think, for instance, that the "intelligent foreigner" of bygone times would have declared that he learnt more of the real character and genius of England by his ride outside the Highflyer through the pleasant Bent country and the- old-fashioned towns of the Isle of Thanet, than he did from lounging about Leicester Square and visiting the sights of London. I am old enough as a traveller to have made the journey from Boulogne to Paris on the summit of a diligence, and, speaking from my own experience, I say confidently that the journey would teach anybody more about France than a week's sojourn in the city of Lutetia. What excursionist nowadays ever sees Abbe- ville, or Arras, or St. Omer, or any of the other famous old towns with which the north of France is studded ? All we know of Lille or Amiens is that the former is one of the worst and the latter is one of the best " buffets " on the Chemin de Fer du Nord. As for C ambrai, and Douai, and Valenciennes, we know perfectly well that we are as little likely ever to see these now as we are to visit Gondar or Soldiers, except in the most improbable event that busineas should force us to visit them. Yet this rapid travelling gives rise to many misconceptions of no unimportant character. Even in well informed English newspapers I see it constantly assumed as an axiom that the Empire has governed Paris at the expense of France, and that the vast development of the capital beneath Napoleon III. is mainly of an artificial character. If people moved less rapidly from point to point, and saw the pro- vinces from a carriage instead of a railway window, this delusion could hardly be entertained by any one who has known France, as I have, for many years. The change and progress in the pro- vincial towns beneath the Empire is quite as astonishing as that visible to all in the French metropolis. In the last few years I have been across the Channel more times than I can possibly remember. I know the different routes between London and Paris pretty nearly as well as I know Piccadilly or the Strand ; but I might travel by the tidal trains every day for a year with- out seeing as much of France as I did the other day in a short journey, which circumstances compelled me to make to the nor- thern frontier of France.

St. Quentin was what Americans call the objective point of my journey. If you know bow to travel by cross-routes, and are able to obtain a French time-table—Bradshaw's foreign guide is utterly unreliable, and I do not know a single place in all London where Livret Choix or the Indicateur is to be seen—you can get to St. Quentin readily enough. Leaving London at half-past seven in. the morning, you can be landed at your destination, via Dover and Calais, by half-past six in the evening, but then you have to change carriages half-a-dozen times, and have to be perpetually on the look out lest you should be carried unawares into Belgium or on to Paris. Hundreds of your readers'have probably passed by St_ uentin, but I suspect if they were put to a competitive examine- on very few .c(f, them could tell exactly where it lay. I know that I myself hags passed by it a dozen times on my way to and from Paris and Brussels, but I knew it only as you know a station, whose name you hear bawled out by railway porters. It happened that I reached it by the Northern railway from Paris, and my carriage was full with the nondescript medley of all nations to be found in any train plying between different countries. But the moment I had left the carriage and turned out of the station, I was in a town as utterly and altogether French as Canterbury is English. If I had wished to speak English I do not suppose I should have found any one to understand me. Travellers other than native

were so unknown there that everybody was supposed to be French, and the whole mongrel race who act on tourists in the shape of guides, porters, touts, and valets de place were altogether wanting. In all provincial towns of Belgium and Northern France the rail- way station appears to me to be a sort of evening lounge for the townsfolk, and so here, as usual, there was a crowd of well-dressed people loitering about the approaches to the station, waiting for• nobody in particular. There were omnibuses in plenty to meet. the train, a good sprinkling of private carriages, and hundreds of well-dressed people, who.se sole ostensible interest consisted in questioning arrivals by the train as to the amount of sport they had met with out shooting. Choosing an hotel at hazard, I found an excellent bed-room and good cooking, such has I should never hope to find at any English provincial town except Liverpool, or- Manchester, or one of our great commercial cities—and not always. there.

Indeed what struck one chiefly about St. Quentin, as it always does about the provincial towns of France, is their superior comfort and luxury to those enjoyed by English cities of similar importance. This very town, I was told, contains about 30,000' inhabitants, and is indeed about the size of Northampton, and not dissimilar to it in commercial respects. Yet streets, houses, shops were all of a better class than they would have been under like circumstances in England. There were very fair shops of every kind, good cafés handsomely fitted up, a good theatre, and an abundance of private carriages. In fact there were all the- indications of a wealthy local society, indications altogether want- ing in English provincial towns of a like kind. We are always fond of saying that Paris is everything under the Imperial system of cen- tralization. Yet, as a matter of fact, Paris has not absorbed the pro- vincial towns to anything like the extent which London has done in England.

No doubt Frenchmen, who with us would live in the country, come into the nearest local town in preference, but still, be the town what it may, a French provincial town is a far less dead- alive place than if it were placed in Great Britain. Then, too, in this part of France, at any rate there is a manifest air of recent prosperity not quite to be matched by us. In our English rural districts you see abundant evidence that people have made and

have got money, but you see comparatively little proof that they murder of the King. It is certain that he and Bothwell took are making it anew. Trade is not good at St. Quentin at this the lead in the affair, and together they were the first telannouue • moment, but yet on every side there were the tokens of fortunes to Mary its completion. Handy at first supported Both.% ell on

freshly made —of money that had changed hands. his marriage with the Queen, but soon became alienated from him,

If you want to know the statistics of St. Quentin, I must refer and joined the coufe1erate nobles who overthrew him. Ere long, you to Murray's handbook. Any schoolboy knows it was he. however, he qu irrellel with his new friends, and on the 29th of sieged in the Anglo-Burgundian wars, but very few could tell June, 1567, was one of the who, with the Ilamiltons, assembled exactly who attacked or defended it. If you want this information at Dumbarton to devise measures for the restoration of the you must not look to me to supply it. I can only tell you that Queen. In the early part of the succeeding August, however, the walls have been long ago pulled down, and that St. Quentin, we find him proposing, along wi th the Hamiltons, that as a means happily for itself, is neither fortified nor garrisoned. There is an of reconciling all parties Mary should be put to death. He Hotel de Vile to be seen, with a very fine Gothic facade, and an acquiesced in Moray's Regency, and was conciliated by that exquisite peal of bells, which chimes the hours night and day, and nobleman by the prospect of having his daughter in marriage. a cathedral, or rather a collegiate church, which is considered, I He signed the bond in the same year to support the authority of believe, a fine specimen of Gothic architecture, and which would be James VI., and carried the sceptre at the first Parliament of very imposing if it were not for the whitewash with which its

glorious arches and columns are still disfigured. tion in favour of Mary at Hamilton in May, 1568, and went But the Hotel de Ville, as you will learn on inquiry, is not visible inside at present, because the roof was injured by the

grele. All the time indeed you stop at St. Quentin anybody Argyll in arms, had reduced all the north to her obedience, and was you meet will talk to you of little else except the g, ele. advancing southwards when he was stopped by orders from Mary Wherever you go you will see traces of the great calamity which (who had another project in hand) to desist from that enter- has recently befallen the country. The monster hail-storm,

for such it was, made but little noise out of France, but if half the accounts I heard upon the spot were true it must have been a most remarkable occurrence. About two months at last found Moray's power too strong for them, and came to a ago, the storm burst over the district at five o'clock on a convention with him on the 10th of May, 1569. After the murder of Moray Huntly obtained from the Queen the commission of sultry Sunday afternoon. The sky was a dead copper-colour hue, and sheet lightning had been playing about the horizon for hours. Suddenly a perfect deluge of hail-stones came north in her cause. The Regent Lennox marched against crashing from the clouds. Numbers of people assured me they him, and he was proclaimed a traitor. He joined Lord Claud had seen stones of the size of half a brick, and strange as the Hamilton in the sortie from Edinburgh which ended in the February 23, 1573, when he came to terms statement is, I can believe it, from the injuries of which the traces murder of Lennox, and they two were accused by the actual per- are still visible on roofs and walls. The thunder-claps were in- petrator of having given the order for that crime. Huntly con- cessant, and the peasants crouched under any shelter they could tinned in arms till find, screaming out that the end of the world was come, and call- with the Regent Morton, and joined in the general pacification. ing on each other to confess their sins. The storm only lasted He then retired into the country, and died very suddenly at for about twenty minutes. But when it was over the country Strathbogie in May, 1576. Such a career speaks for itself. He was succeeded by his son George, sixth Earl of Huntly, who was was half ruined. The crops were literally destroyed, so that there has actually been no harvest. The leaves were stripped off the lie by the road- trees, great trunks were pelted down, and still than his father's, was scarcely less discreditable in other respects side as memorials of the devastation. Houses were unroofed . He became the head of the extreme Catholic party, entered into with the Court of Spain in 1588, and rose in and roads broken up. No life seems to have been lost, as there correspondence had been warning of the coming storm, and the labourers were not in the fields, owing to the day being Sunday. But in the de- partment of the Aisne, where the storm commenced, the losses are estimated at twenty millions of francs. The local assurance be offices have only been able to pay a small per-tentage of the policies in the face of so wide-spread a loss, and many small proprietors

who were in easy circumstances before the grele are now reduced the King gave Huntly a commission to pursue him and his fol- to absolute want. Nearly half a century ago there occurred a

lowers with fire and sword. Huntly availed himself of this (there similar storm of hail, but its destructiveness is not believed to have are grave reasons to believe with the King's sanction) to destroy a powerful neighbour and rival, the "bonny Earl of Moray," been so great. The rainy weather which succeeded the storm,

followed as it was by the long, hot, summer, has done much to nephew of the Regent, whose great earldom had, as we have seen, restore, the aspect of the country and to erase the traces of the formerly been granted to the Gordons of Handy. From this and

o storm. But still you can scarcely pass a house near St. Quentin other causes, Moray being also a great leader of the Protestant whose roof is not being repaired or has just been repaired.

town itself lay comparatively out of the range of the tempest, but two Earls. But Lord Ochiltree, a Stewart, a firm friend of