Sunday was a great day, when the little street and the _plage_ were quite alive with holiday folk who flocked in from the neighbouring farms and villages to see the fine people from Paris. It was a very picturesque crowd. Of course the sailor-men were all dressed in their best blue cloth, with their red knitted woollen caps throwing a tassel jauntily on one side. The well-to-do farmers’ wives and daughters were very smart. Striped petticoats coming down a little above the ankle, showing a neat little pair of wooden sabots, or even leather shoes; black-silk aprons; white fichus folded over their breasts; upon their heads the old, high twelfth-century caps, trimmed with lace, which our ladies said was beautiful, handed down from mother to daughter for generations. A few years ago I was at Trouville once more upon a Sunday. Alas! the old costumes were no longer there. The present generation of farmers’ wives were all garbed and hatted in imitation of Paris fashions. It was too sad! They were a fine, strapping, healthy race of women, with beautiful skins and cheeks as rosy as the apples of their own orchards. Some of the girls were very handsome, sweet and modest-looking; rather shy of the foreigners. It may be said that I was not of an age to judge, but I was a long-eared little pitcher, and I heard what my elders said. The men were not so picturesquely attired, but there was a touch of local character about their get-up also. A great ally of ours was a certain old Monsieur Pommier (I don’t suppose he was more than forty, but to us he seemed a Methuselah), who always came to see us dressed in his Sunday best. A brown coat as stiff as iron, and as uncomfortable as a strait waistcoat, with a ridiculous little pair of tails about six inches long sticking out behind almost at right angles to his waist; a phenomenally high collar reaching to his ears, a tall stock above a flowered white waistcoat; on his reddish, close-cropped head a black beaver hat, brushed the wrong way; in his hand a stick with the thick end downwards, held by a leathern thong at the small end; tiny side-whiskers, and a face and nose shining from recent soapsuds. He was the type of the prosperous Normandy farmers and cider-makers of his day. If they were proverbially a close-fisted race, they knew how to be hospitable, and there was an old-world courtesy which pierced through their roughness and was most attractive. To us they were very kindly, and the memory of them is still pleasant. It was a motley crowd that came to mix with the grand ladies, the dandies, the _nounous_, the little bare-legged children making sand-castles, watching an itinerant Polichinelle or scrambling about the mussel-clad Roches Noires under the careful eyes of governesses and tutors.