Having a strong desire to procure some of the small compact Norman draught horses for my farm-work, I ventured last year to visit Normandy, for the purpose of making the desired selections. I took with me a young friend, who had been partly educated in France, as my interpreter with the French horse-dealers, and to arrange every particular for me during my intended hasty intercourse with the foreigners. But previously we went for passports to the office in Poland-street, where the Consul filled up the documents without ever looking at our faces, and I believe very incorrectly as to portraiture. “Your profession?” inquired he in French, as he was scribbling down the length of my nose, the colour of my hair and eyes, &c. “Homme de lettres,” responded my companion for me. I nodded my head in acquiescence, without knowing anything about the matter; but I was quite satisfied when my friend explained it afterwards to me, and assured me that Lord Brougham, when Lord Chancellor, had from sheer modesty sunk his rank and other artificial honours on going to Paris, and simply designated himself as “Avocat, et homme de lettres.” “Does not all the world,” said my companion, “know perfectly well that you are, in the first place, one of the props of the Irish Penny Journal?” “Enough,” said I, somewhat tickled by the reference to Lord Brougham; “be it as you please--though I think that, as a farmer going to France merely to buy horses, I might as well have been written down under the useful character of ‘agriculturist.’” My passport, however, was by this time in my pocket, and any alteration in it was out of the question. I had ascertained that a fair would be held on a particular day at Falaise, and having time enough to make a long journey by land, and much curiosity to see Calais, I determined to go there: we reached that port early in the day. “Well, then, I am in France,” said I, as we landed from the steamer on the pier; “here I am, actually on the Continent, looking at French soldiers, who won’t shoot me, stab me, nor take me prisoner, and on fishwomen, with kerchiefs tastily arranged on their heads, large ear-rings, and brown faces, and hearing a language altogether strange to me.” After staring about me there for half a day, and eating a very nice dinner in a very grand hotel, fitted up as if there was never any winter in that part of France, we moved onwards in a most extraordinary kind of coach: such a lumbering machine!--less than an entire troop of cavalry appeared to me insufficient to move its prodigious wheels; yet five miserable-looking horses, with dirty half rotten harness, were compelled to pull it along towards Boulogne at the rate of more than four miles an hour.