par ici,’ thereby expressing the sentiment of the peasant, who associates all that is wild and rugged in nature with the devil.  While still in the forest, and not a little puzzled by its paths, I met a woman and a youth, and asked them if the way I was taking led to Conques. ‘Ape’ (yes) was the reply.  Not a word of French could I draw from them.  When the cliffs were at length scaled, and I was on the open tableland, I found the south wind blowing there with great violence, although in the valley there was scarcely breeze enough to ripple the river pools.  The sun was falling into the yellow haze of the west as I began to descend towards the valley of the Dourdou.  I came upon a tributary of this stream in the bottom of a deep and solemn gorge, whose steep sides were densely wooded except where the rock jutted out and revealed its dark nakedness, and where higher, near the sky, showed here and there a patch of heather-purple waste, on which the brilliant light was softening into evening tones.  But in the depth of the gorge, where the redly-running stream was nearly hidden under the tent of leaves, the air was already dim, and the forms of the trees were beginning to blend with their own shadows.

Following the stream in its course, I found the Dourdou, and then turned down the broader valley.  I was tramping wearily on my way, which seemed endless, when, clustered on the side of another wild and thickly wooded gorge running up amidst the hills, I saw many houses, and a dark pile of masonry, rising far above their roofs.  I knew that this must be Conques; it showed its religious origin so plainly in the choice of the site.  This was selected not because Nature was gentle and pitiful to man in the cleft of those savage hills, but because she was stern and solemn, and the veil that hides the supernatural was felt to be thinner there, where the rocks and forest seemed to the mediaeval mind to have remained just as the Almighty hand had fashioned them.  A monastery arose in the desert, then the abbey church, and gradually a little lay community placed itself under the protection of the religious one.

A long narrow street, steep and stony, leads to the church, which is all that is left of the Benedictine abbey, excepting some massive buttresses, ruinous arches, and a round tower grafted upon the rock—­remnants of the ancient monastery which must have been half a fortress.  The burg itself was fortified, and one of the gateways of the old wall is still standing.  The existing church dates from the eleventh century, but various details point to the conclusion that it was built on the site of a more ancient structure.  For example, in the entrance is a holy-water stoup, the basin having been scooped out of the capital of a column which is supposed to have been one of the supports of a very primitive altar.  The figure of an emperor is carved on one of the faces, and on another that of a pagan divinity.  The architecture of the church is simple and majestic, the only jarring