returning with his sheep from the herbage, the young lambs bleating
pitifully in an inner shed. It is the custom here to send the sheep
afield during the day, the lambs meantime being fed on hay. Here again,
I should say, is a commercial mistake. The lamb of pasture-fed animals
must be incontestably superior. Humanity here seems on the side of
utilitarianism. Who can say? Perhaps the inferiority of French meat in
certain regions arises from this habit of stabling cattle and sheep. The
drive from Clairmarais to St. Omer took us through a quite different and
much more attractive country. We were now in the marais, an amphibious
stretch of country, cut up into gardens and only accessible by tiny
canals. It is a small Holland. This vast stretch of market garden,
intersected by waterways just admitting the passage of a boat, is very
productive. Three pounds per hectare is often paid in rent. The early
vegetables, conveyed by boat to St. Omer, are largely exported to
England. Every inch of ground is turned to account, the turf-bordered,
canal-bound gardens making a pretty scene, above the green levels
intersected by gleaming water the fine towers of St. Omer clearly
outlined against the brilliant sky.
The English colony of former days vanished on the outbreak of the last
war, not to return. A few young English Catholics still prepare for the
priesthood here, and eighty more were at this time pursuing their
studies at Douai, under the charge of English Benedictines. "Why,"
impatiently asked Arthur Young in 1788, "are Catholics to emigrate in
order to be ill-educated abroad, instead of being allowed institutions
that would educate them well at home?"
The disabilities he reprobates have long since been removed, but
English-speaking seminarists still flock to Douai.
Here I close this agricultural and industrial round in Picardy and
French Flanders, regions so near home, yet so unfamiliar to most of us!
And here I close what, in many respects, may be called another round in
unfrequented France.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's In the Heart of Vosges, by Matilda Betham-Edwards