open baskets at their sides; the cure came bearing the monstrance and Host, followed by Sisters with little girls in their charge; lastly was a mixed throng of parishioners.  Most of the women held rosaries, and a few of them, bent with age, carried upon their heads the very cap that old Mother Hubbard wore, if tradition and English artists are to be trusted.  As the last of the long procession passed out of sight between the walls of white linen, the wind brought the words clearly back: 

    ’Genitori, Genitoque
    Laus et jubilatio.’

Now I entered the little church that was quite empty, and where no sound would have been heard if the two voices in the tower had not continued to ring out over the dovecotes, where the white pigeons rested and wondered, and over the broad fields where the bending grasses and listening flowers stood in the afternoon sunshine, ’Laus et jubilatio,’ in the language of the bells.

The church was Romanesque, probably of the twelfth century.  The nave was flanked by narrow aisles.  Upon the very tall bases of the columns were carved, together with foliage, fantastic heads of demons, or satyrs of such expressive ugliness that they held me fascinated.  Some were bearded, others were beardless, some were grinning and showing frightful teeth, others had thick-lipped, pouting mouths hideously debased.  A few were really bons diables, who seemed determined to be gay, and to joke under the most trying circumstances; but the greater number had morose faces, puckered by the long agony of bearing up the church.  Such variety of expression in ugliness was a triumph of art in the far-off age, when the chisel of an unremembered man with a teeming imagination made these heads take life from the inanimate stone.

The road from Autoire to St. Cere soon led me into the valley of the Bave, a beautiful trout-stream, galloping towards the Dordogne through flowery meadows, on this last day of May, and under leaning trees, whose imaged leaves danced upon the ripples in the green shade.  As I had no need to hurry, I loitered to pick ragged-robins upon the banks, flowers dear to me from old associations.  Very common in England, they are comparatively rare in France.

New pleasures await the wayfarer every hour, almost every minute, in the day, and however long he may continue to wander over this wonderful world of inexhaustible variety, if he will only stop to look at everything, and so learn to feel the charm of little things.

I met a beggar, and fell into conversation with him.  He asked me for nothing, and was surprised when I gave him two sous.  He was a ragged old man, with a canvas bag, half filled with crusts, slung upon his side.  I had already met many such beggars in this part of France.  They travel about from village to village, filling their bags with pieces of bread that are given them, and selling afterwards what they cannot eat as food for pigs.  As they rarely receive charity in the form of money, they do not expect it.  This kind of mendicant is distinctly rural, and belongs to old times.