Saint-Lô

All these practices have injured our breeds without successfully retaining their own native qualities.

End of section twelve.

Read by Guy Dunn, St. Louis, Missouri, June seventeenth, twenty twenty-four.

Section thirteen of The Percheron Horse.

This is a LibriVox recording.

It is a country of green fields and orchards and sunken lanes, of dank parks and mouldering châteaux, of deserted mills and ancient parish churches, of quaint timbered houses and long village streets, of silent streams, small ports and pebbly beaches, the whole merging ultimately in the neighbouring lands of Brittany and Maine.

Its typical places are Falaise, Vire and Argentan, with their ancient castles of the Norman dukes, Bayeux and Coutances, the foundations of whose soaring cathedrals carry us back to the princely prelates of the Conquest, provincial capitals of the old regime like Valognes, or the new like Saint-Lô, and best of all the crowning glories of the marvel of Mont-Saint-Michel.

Its chief town is Caen, stern and grey, the heart of Normandy, as Rouen is its head.

An old poet tells us no ancient Roman capital but the creation of the medieval dukes, who reared its great abbey churches to commemorate the marriage and the piety of William the Conqueror and Matilda, and who established their exchequer in its castle.