recompenced him by a grant of Evreux. Upon the death of this prince without issue, in 1584, Evreux reverted to the crown, and the title lay dormant till 1652, when Louis XIVth exchanged the earldom with the Duc de Bouillon, in return for the principality of Sedan. In his family it remained till the revolution, which, amalgamating the whole of France into one common mass of equal rights and laws, put an end to all local privileges and other feudal tenures. Evreux, at present, is a town containing about eight thousand inhabitants, a great proportion of whom are persons of independent property, or _rentiers_, as the French call them. Hence it has an air of elegance, seldom to be found in a commercial, and never in a manufacturing town; and to us this appearance was the more striking, as being the first instance of the kind we had seen in Normandy. The streets are broad and beautifully neat. The city stands in the midst of gardens and orchards, in a fertile valley, watered by the Iton, and inclosed towards the north and south by ranges of hills. The river divides into two branches before it reaches the town, both which flow on the outside of the walls. But, besides these, a portion of its waters has been conducted through the centre of the city, by means of a canal dug by the order of Jane of Navarre. This Iton, like the Mole, in Kent, suddenly loses itself in the ground, near the little town of Damville, about twenty miles south of Evreux, and holds its subterranean course for nearly two miles. A similar phenomenon is observable with a neighboring stream, the Risle, between Ferrière and Grammont[46]: in both cases it is attributed, I know not with what justice, to an abrupt change in the stratification of the soil. * * * * * FOOTNOTES: