In the city of to-day, and in such thoroughfares as the Rue de l'Epicerie, you may look for a moment into that humbler and less spacious form of habitation in which the people and the workers lived their days, making up for the poverty of their own surroundings by the magnificence of that great Cathedral which rose above the low horizon of their roofs, and opened its doors to poor and rich alike. The buildings that have so long outlived their inhabitants may be taken as the background--like the permanent stone scenery in a Greek theatre--to the shifting kaleidoscope of many-coloured life in the old city. In the place itself you will see scarcely a trace of the great personages whose names have glittered in its list of sieges, battles, massacres, pageants, and triumphal entries. The story of a town is not a drum-and-trumpet chronicle of the Kings and Queens. It is the tale of all those domestic and municipal details which from their very unimportance have well-nigh disappeared. To hear it you must follow me from the Crypte St. Gervais to the Cathedral, from the Hotellerie des Bons Enfants to the Maison Bourgtheroulde, and it is to the voices of the people that I shall ask you to listen, and to the life of the people that I shall point you among the streets they lived in. Thus, and thus only, may you possibly realise the spirit of the place, that calls out first to every stranger in the bells that sound through the silence of his first night in a foreign town. These you shall know better soon in Rouen, by name even, "Rouvel" and "Cache-Ribaut," if you be worldly-minded, "Georges d'Amboise" and "Marie d'Estouteville" for your hours of prayer. Before you pass beyond their sound again, their ancient voices shall bring to you something of the centuries that had died when they were young, something of the individuality of the city above which they have been swinging for so long. "Spirit of Place," writes the most charming of our living essayists:-- "It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name. It is recalled all a lifetime, having been perceived a week, and is not scattered but abides, one living body of remembrance. The untravelled spirit of place--not to be pursued, for it never flies, but always to be discovered, never absent, without variation--lurks in the byways and rules over the towers, indestructible, an indescribable unity. It awaits us always in its ancient and eager freshness. It is sweet and nimble within its immemorial boundaries, but it never crosses them. Long white roads outside have mere suggestions of it and prophecies; they give promise, not of its coming, for it abides, but of a new and singular and unforseen goal for our present pilgrimage, and of an intimacy to be made."