Every foreign city was fortified, and outside the fortifications the glacis had to be kept clear of trees and buildings, so as not to give cover to the enemy. This fact has influenced the approach to all continental towns, they are not led up to as in England; and the poor are lodged differently--they occupy big houses, which they delight in making untidy, and exposing the dishevelled condition of their dwellings to every passer-by. The very lanes between walls are untidy--every possible scrap of refuse collects in them, the stray feathers of fowls that have been plucked throughout the year eddy there, old rags--discarded only when dropping off--rot there, scraps of tin canister are kicked about there, old boots get sodden there. But there is always an effort after tidiness about English cottages; and somehow the approaches to our towns are not offensive to eye and nose, but quite the reverse; the pretty cottages, their well-cared-for gardens, the villas with bosquets of seringa and lilac, combine in making the approach full of studies for the painter--reposeful pictures of general comfort and happiness. [Illustration: Dockacre: Launceston: Old Town House, Launceston.] In a foreign town the palace jostles with the gaunt house in which the poor herd. In England there are no palaces in our country towns, but there are excellent middle-class mansions, the Queen Anne red brick tall house, with stone quoins, where lives the substantial solicitor, who makes the wills and draws up the leases for all the squires of the neighbourhood, who is clerk of the Petty Sessions, and is consulted by every one more as a confidential friend than as a professional man. There is the prim house, with exactly as many windows on one side of the door as on the other, and a round-headed window over it, where three old ladies keep a school for girls. There is the many-gabled house inhabited by the late rector's widow. There is the quaint slated house with its bow-windows, within rich with beautiful plaster work and carved wood, supposed to be by Grinling Gibbons. It has a garden in terraces descending to the river, with vases on the balustrade of the terraces full of scarlet geraniums. Then there comes the modern county bank of cut stone, and of inconceivable incongruity and ugliness; then an old inn frequented by the Tory squires in past days. There is the old grammar school with its pedimented door and ivy creeping over the red-brick walls, fought with every year, and forced back from overrunning the windows, as it has overrun the walls. There is the doctor's house, with a portico supported by slim Corinthian pillars, and with a lead above, on which the doctor's wife sets out her flowers, that make a blaze of colour up and down the street. There is the stuccoed wine merchant's house--always painted drab every third year--that has red blinds, through which the lamps at night diffuse a ruby glow into the street. There is that long wall with an elaborately