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This rugged crag in the midst of a wilderness, showing no vestige of human existence save a few smooth-cut stones that carry back the mind far into a hazy past, is locally known as the Château de Roque-Prive.

On a yet later day Brother Raphael, a Swiss of whom mention has already been more than once made in these pages, asked and obtained the consent of his superior to invite their English visitor to take a walk with him over the hills in order, as he was pleased to say, to have the satisfaction of speaking and hearing his mother-tongue in the company of one whom he credited with more or less knowledge of it; and the two, equally sojourners in a foreign land and sprung from a Teutonic stock, accordingly walked together for three hours, during which the writer benefited by the opportunity thus afforded him of furbishing up his too rusty German. It may be observed that this member of the house, though not among the brethren in holy orders-having been admitted only to the tonsure or lowest clerical degree-was a young man of some information, occasionally speaking to points of history, and now and then, by way of variety, clothing a remark in a Latin dress. Yet his chief avocations were of a strictly domestic character, such as the care of the convent wardrobe, and looking after the chamber of any

chance visitor. It seemed strange to hear the person who had perhaps just supplied you with a pitcher of water, or put straight your little paillasse bed for the night, take his leave with some such salutation as 'Tibi volo bonam noctem et somnum quietum.' To these manual employments however he joined, as was seen in a previous chapter, the duty of singing the Canonical Hours among the choir, as well as the more unique function of chanting alone, from behind a column, the entire musical part of Requiem masses in a cadence uniformly monotonous. It is thus that in religious houses manual duties, often of a kind which with us would be considered 'menial,' are combined in the same person with functions of a more or less spiritual and intellectual cast. So that if the habits of life and thought engendered in these oldworld institutions may be thought to tend in some respects towards a certain narrowness of mind, on the other hand they seem to strike at the roots of many a petty vanity and class distinction.

One Sunday afternoon, the writer had strolled down from the heights above into the watershed of the Dourdou below; when, being overtaken by a lad of some fifteen or sixteen summers, the two pedestrians walked in company along the road skirting the riverside. In a confused dialect of French and provincial idiom, this lad recounted

how he had passed four months in quality of chorister with the Premonstrants of St. Faith's monastery up above. He had desired, so far as he made his meaning intelligible, to become a novice with a view to making profession as a choir brother; but, n'étant pas bien savant,' the monks were loth to receive him otherwise than as a lay brother or servitor, which position not satisfying his ambition (though only a labourer's son), he returned once more to the world, and to that manual labour for which doubtless he was better fitted than for a conventual life. Further on the ex-chorister pointed out to his temporary companion a fertile meadow on the right, betwixt the roadway and river, as that assigned by tradition for the scene of the martyrdom of a thousand Christians in a remote antiquity, which, on turning to local annalists, will be found relegated to the somewhat nebulous period of the year of Christ 371. As the pedestrians continued their walk by the water's edge towards the village of St.-Cyprien, overhanging wooded cliffs closing in the glen on either side, this Rouergue peasant boy remarked that now and then, though at rare intervals, wolves had been seen in the mountains roundabout; but as seven years at the least had elapsed since such an occurrence, the tribe would appear well nigh extinct in these parts. A very different state of things pre

vailed in this respect during the ninth century--the days of Charlemagne and Louis-le-Débonnaire, in whose time Conques Abbey was founded-when we read of the wolves that went prowling in countless numbers through half-depopulated Aquitaine,' which then included Guienne. This, however, is the less to be wondered at ten centuries since, considering that no longer agc than the year of grace 1877, the Prefect of the department of the Indre in Touraine actually issued a proclamation for a general battue against the wolves, which had been making their presence uncomfortably felt even in the early autumn, and in what goes by the name of the 'garden of France.'

A league or so north of Conques the Dourdou unites itself with the more ample stream of the Lot, flowing from east to west. On the opposite or Auvergne shore of the wooded Lot, and somewhat higher up its course, the village of St.-Projet, overhung by cliffs, lies low on the river margin, although many of the buildings straggle in irregular tiers up the nether slope of a lofty receding bank. Picturesque it undoubtedly is, especially from the bird's-eye view of the carriage road which, hewn in the rock, is carried across the toppling cliff far above the hamlet; yet the deep, slippery, long-standing mire of the narrow alleys (spite of a dry seasor), the stagnant heaps and pools about the doors, and

the general untidiness, together with, possibly, here and there a passing odour so dear as a grievance to English tourists, could not but suggest that contrast between picturesqueness, as looked at from without, and matter-of-fact dirt and squalor, which is a not unfrequent concomitant of artistic effect.

In this instance, however, the artistic effect presented from the outside was not belied by the interior aspect of the place, the abounding mud notwithstanding. For, on threading the thoroughfares of this Auvergnat village, nestling by the river's edge under a crag-an ideal subject for the landscape painter-you come upon trellised vines, steep winding lanes, rickety houses that seem made for the easel bathed by the broad waters of the Lot, whose opposite bank, dense with timber, rises sharp and sombre in front of you. A rugged path leads up to the church. As the stranger approached, a tortoiseshell puss sat purring on the sill of an open window of the parsonage, which was built up, somewhat eccentrically, against the western end of the church. This the traveller entered, leaving the door ajar. A few moments later there walked leisurely in the tortoiseshell, though whether prompted by an abnormal curiosity or in quest of a stray church mouse need not here be determined. Certain it was she seemed, like her master doubtless, to be equally at home here and in the adjoining

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