Then would come a field with mangy patches of colourless grass, the trees standing sharply outlined in all shades of vivid emerald green: an orchard of gnarled branches of the very palest green imaginable--a sort of etherealized mildew, backed by a fine old slated farm-house. Close beside it a farmyard, the ground literally dotted all over with black hens, busy over remunerative pickings. A little further on was another orchard, this time filled with whitened skeletons of trees, their bark all being stripped from off the trunks. The hedgerows were crowned with quick successions of briary--the grey hair of the dying year--and at the end of one of them was an avenue of gnarled dwarf willows bordered by a winding stream; their rounded heads shewing soft purple against the green meadow. At Duclair it was evidently market-day. The train was ushered in by a clatter and jabber of voices, shrill and hoarse mixed: all shouting at the top of their voices. The platform was littered with various coloured sacks, well filled out; market baskets in all positions, and little wooden barred cages for the poor cramped domestic fowl. Beyond Duclair the trees look like brooms the wrong way up: as if grown on the principle of the received tradition in London markets as to the correct complexion of asparagus--long bare trunks and only at the latter end a little bit of spread green to shew that it was the business end. These trees were presently merged in a dark belt of forest, standing clear against a soft grey lilac horizon of distant land shouldering the sky. Deep-roofed cottages, velveted with moss and lichen; an old _château_ with steep slate gables; alternate green and red brown meadow, picked out in places with sombrely dark brushwood, with delicate, incisive, clear cut edge against the softer foliaged trees. Then a broad band of glittering steel encircling the hills which rose abruptly behind it. Most of the cottages here have a sort of hem of arabesque ornamentation from the flowers which grow freely all along the tops of the roofs. The Seine, like the Jordan of old, overflowed its banks pretty considerably this autumn, to judge by the look of the land in this district. Just before the train slowed into the little primitive terminus of Caudebec, the rain, which had held up for half an hour or so, came on again, whipping the river's surface into long weals. Caudebec itself is on the banks of the river, with rising ground almost surrounding it. Were it not for the modern element which has, as usual, played ducks and drakes with the picturesque element, Caudebec would be unique.