After a light lunch in an arbor in a delicious garden back of a café, we started to see Rouen, its cathedral and the statue of Joan, and what else was to be seen. We urged Tibbitts to accompany us. He concluded to do it, though he protested it was far more pleasant to sit in that arbor, even though it was beastly wine he was drinking instead of the delicious whisky of Oshkosh, than it was tramping around in search of antiquities.
We came to a narrow street, one of the kind only to be seen in French cities. The entire space from wall to wall could not have been twelve feet, and on either hand were curious houses, seven stories high, entered by dark, narrow tunnels rather than passages, but with flowers at every window, clear to the queer, quaint top, which was continued after it had reached what should have been its summit. The professor stopped before one of these dark passages, and observed a parcel of illy dressed but marvelously clean children—there are no dirty children in France—playing some game.
“It is wonderful!” said the Professor, in an ecstacy; “here are we, of the new West, standing on ground in a street through which, may be, the soldiers of old France marched. Here are we within sight of the place where Joan of Arc was burned, on ground pressed by the feet of Charlemagne. In this house, perchance, were born heroes; within these walls for hundreds of years have been born children who have grown to manhood, and died. These children, playing in this gutter, were born in this historic city, and——”
“And they all speak French,” interrupted Tibbitts, “which I can’t, but, thank Heaven, I can lay all over ’em in English. Look here, Professor, don’t give us any more rot about this being old. We are just as old in Oshkosh as they are in Rouen. When the old Norman warriors were cruising about
THE BOYS OF ROUEN.