It is some few years, I forget how many, since I was last in a Norman town, and must confess that in some respects they have changed for the better, externally at least, now that the Second Empire has had time to make itself felt in them. All manner of police arrangements, the sweeping, lighting, and paving, are marvellously improved, and there is an air of prosperity about them which does one good. Even in Rouen, the centre of their cotton district, there are scarcely any outward signs of distress, although, so far as I could see, not more than one in three of the mills is at work. I was told that there are still nearly 30,000 operatives out of work in the town and neighbourhood, who have no means of subsistence except any odd job they can pick up to earn a few sous about the quays and markets, but if it be so they kept out of sight during my wanderings about the town. But there is one characteristic sign of the empire to be noted in all these same Norman towns, for which strangers will not feel thankful, though the inhabitants may. The building and improving fever is on them all. In Rouen, amongst other improvements, a broad new street is being made right through some of the oldest parts of the town, from the quays straight up to the boulevards, which it joins close by the railway-station. This Grand Rue de l’Empereur will be a splendid street when finished, to judge by the few houses which are already built at the lower end. Meantime, the queer gables of the houses whose neighbours have been destroyed, and a chapel or two, and an old tower, standing out all by itself, which would make the architectural fortune of any other city, and which find themselves with breathing room now, for the first time, I should think, in the last five hundred years, look down ruefully on the cleared space, in anticipation of the hour rapidly approaching, when they will be again shut out from human ken by four-storied stone palaces, and this time, undoubtedly, for good and all. They can never hold up until another improving dynasty arrives.