It was a pleasant time--so pleasant that I am afraid that I did not regret perhaps so much as I ought to have done the continued delay of the Birmingham appointment for which I was all this time waiting. But pleasant as it was, its pleasantness was not sufficient wholly to restrain me from indulging in that propensity for rambling which has been with me the ruling passion of a long life-time. It was in the spring following that merry Christmas that I found time for a little tour of about three weeks in Normandy. The reader need not fear that I am going to tell him anything of all I did and all I saw, though every detail of it seemed to me at the time worthy of minute record. But it has all been written and printed some scores of times since those days--by myself once among the rest--and may now be dismissed with a “See guide-books _passim_.” The expenses of my travel accurately recorded I have also before me. There indeed I might furnish some facts which would be new and surprising to tourists of the present day, but they would only serve to make him discontented with his generation. There is one anecdote, however, connected with this little journey, which I must relate. I was returning from southern Normandy and reached Caen without a penny in my pocket. My funds, carefully husbanded as they had been, had sufficed to carry me so far and no further. There were no such things as telegrams or railways in those days; and I had nothing for it but to go to an hotel and there remain till my application to Hadley for funds could be answered--an affair of some ten or twelve days as things then were. While I was waiting and kicking my heels about the old Norman city, from which I had already extracted all the interest it could afford me, I lounged into the shop of a bookseller, M. Mancel. I revisited him on a subsequent occasion, and find the record of this second visit in the first of two volumes which I wrote, and entitled _A Summer in Brittany_. There I find that M. Mancel is “the publisher of numerous works on the history and antiquities of Normandy.... M. Mancel has also an extensive collection of old books on Norman history; but the rarest and most curious articles are congregated into a most bibliomaniacal looking cabinet, and are _not_ for sale.”