Henri IV., Richelieu, and Colbert, who employed Vauban, not only improved the harbours, but added to the defences of the town, which in 1694 and 1759 resisted English bombardments. In 1856 the walls were removed, and the town now relies on three forts. LEAVING HAVRE FOR ROUEN The road to Rouen is through the Rue de Normandie, and this rapidly brings one to the suburb of Graville, where, on the left side of the road, on a hill above the Town Hall, stands the church of the Abbey of Ste. Honorine. It is an interesting building of the eleventh century, with curiously carved corbels outside, and within capitals as grotesque, and the sarcophagus which contained the remains of St. Honoria. Pilgrims, it is said, were just as numerous at Graville after the relics of the saint had been removed to Conflans for safety at the time of the Norman invasion! The view over the Seine from the abbey church is exceedingly fine, and on sunny mornings the broad river shimmers in a silvery light. HARFLEUR, to which the tramway comes, is a quaint town, with narrow streets and a flamboyant church, whose highly enriched spire and curiously tall north porch, recessed in the wall and full of elaborate carving, give one a foretaste of that wealth of detail and medieval charm which a tour through Normandy offers to the stranger. Either the walls of Harfleur must in 1415 have been exceedingly strong or their defenders of exceptional resource and courage, for in that year Henry V., with 30,000 English, besieged the town when the garrison numbered only 400, and yet for no less than forty days did they maintain the defence. It was 75 Englishmen to 1 Frenchman; but it generally took a few weeks to get through medieval walls, unless treachery or hunger came to the help of the attackers. Harfleur languished as a port owing to the shifting sand of the river-mouth, and the growth of Havre put an end to its commercial importance. [Illustration: No. 1 HAVRE AND DIEPPE TO ROUEN] Bending to the left after passing the church, and going to the right almost immediately at a fork, Harfleur is soon left behind, as the road ascends the side of a green valley containing one or two large country houses. The farms stand compactly inside a hedge of trees, which almost hides the buildings, and suggests the _tun_, or hedge, of the villages of our Saxon ancestors. A straight poplar-bordered road leads past pretty thatched farmyards, with timber-framed barns, to St. Romain de Colbosc. Besides the sixteenth-century cross in the cemetery there is a twelfth-century lepers’ chapel, with paintings inside, but it has for long been reduced to a mere farm-building. In St. Romain one turns to the right for Lillebonne, and soon afterwards the road bears nearly due east, and runs straight for Lillebonne, descending into the picturesque wooded valley of the Bolbec River with several turns. LILLEBONNE