When there was a regular community of monks here, the ancient pilgrimage to Notre Dame de l’Oder was kept up, and near the top of the via crucis, which forms a long succession of zigzags upon the bare rock, a dark shrub or small tree allied to box may be seen railed off with an image of the Virgin against it.  According to the legend, a Crusader returning from the Holy Land made a pilgrimage to the sanctuary upon these rocks at Ambialet, and planted on the hill the staff he had brought with him.  This grew to a tree, to which the people of the country gave the name of oder.  In course of time it came to be so venerated that Notre Dame d’Ambialet was changed to Notre Dame de l’Oder.  The existing tree is said to be a descendant of the original one.

The monks at the priory told me that nearly all the old historical documents relating to Ambialet had been taken away by the English and placed in the Tower of London.  In various parts of the Quercy, I had also been told exactly the same with regard to the documents connected with the early history of the locality.  There are people who still speak of this as a proof of the intention of the English to return.  How the belief became so widespread that the English placed the documents which they carried away in the Tower of London, I am unable to explain.

Memory takes me back again to the farmhouse by the Tarn.  It is well that there is plenty of space, for the household is numerous.  There are the farmer, his wife and children, an aged mother whose voice has become a mere thread of sound, and who thinks over the past in the chimney-corner, sometimes with a distaff in her hand; two old uncles, a youth of all work, who has been brought up as one of the family, and a little bright-eyed, bare-legged servant girl, whose brown feet I still hear pattering upon the floors.  One of the old men is a white-bearded priest of eighty-five, who has spent most of his life in Algeria, and has himself come to look like the patriarchal Arab in all but the costume.  He has no longer any sacerdotal work, but he has other occupation.  His special duty is to look after a great flesh-coloured pig, and many a time have I seen him under the orchard trees following close at the heels of the grunting beast while reading his office.  His old breviary, like his soutane, is very much the worse for wear, the leaves having been thumbed nearly to the colour of chocolate; but if he had a new one now, he would find it hard to believe that it had the same virtue as the other.  Notwithstanding his years, he can do harder work than watching a pig.  I have seen him haymaking and reaping, and always the merriest of the party.  Before taking the fork or the sickle in hand, he would hitch up his soutane, and reveal a pair of still active sacerdotal legs in white linen drawers.  The sight of the old man bending his back while reaping, his white beard brushing the golden corn, was pathetic or comic as the humour might