Perhaps, an exceptional reader--I say "exceptional" advisedly--may have stopped at Havre after crossing over from Southampton--stopped a sufficient time to learn and know the place, for the generality of travellers who adopt this route to Paris, usually go on straight to their destination without breaking their journey at this picturesque old town, which is a sort of "half-way house" on the direct road. If so, the "exceptional reader" will bear me out in my observations on the subject and place. Havre is like Liverpool and Boulogne rolled into one harmonious or inharmonious whole. It has all the shipping and maritime population-- although perhaps the latter are more gaily dressed--of the great entrepot on the Mersey, with all the thorough Gallic attributes of a French watering place. Down in the town, Havre proper, it is all trade and bustle as befits a great commercial port; up amidst the heights of Ingouville, it is fashionable and fantastic, with its trim white terraces and green, gay Venetian blinds, and its lovely view of the bay beyond. Havre is really not considered half as much as it ought to be, and forms a much more enjoyable spot for a holiday than many of these fearfully uneventful and racketty fashionable resorts, which are generally patronised by English tourists on the Continent. Liverpool it is like, with its muddy Seine--like the other river that runs between Birkenhead and its sister city--and its bustling streets and quays. Liverpool, with a touch of Ratcliffe Highway, on account of the parrots and foreign birds, mostly South American, that you see troops of sailors marching about with, besides the strong touch of the military element which one more frequently observes by the side of Tower Hill, than in the parallel city of trade in Lancashire. A French Liverpool, very Frenchified, and jovial and gay, with that foreign dash of sprightliness and _insouciance_ which is never seen in England. Here Markworth hired lodgings, in the _Rue Montmartre_, of a stout, middle-aged Frenchwoman and her little husband: the latter being a _marchand_ of something or the other; and by no means the "better half" of the two. Susan was as pleased as a child with the novelty of everything around her; and if she had been changed for the better at The Poplars, the change was twice as noticeable now that she had shut out from her all the past with its associations. Every little item in her new life tended to increase the improvement in her mental organisation; besides which Markworth was kind and attentive to her, even more so than he had been before.