like the rest of the linen, has not been ironed, folds it into
four, lays it upon another board, smooths it with his large, thin
yellow hand, and so goes on with his task without saying a word or
raising his eyes. He is a gaunt, angular, sallow man of about fifty,
with hollow cheeks and long black beard. He has a melancholy air, and
does his work as though he were thinking all the while that it is a
part of the sum of labour he has to get through before reaching that
perfect state of felicity in which there is no more washing to be done
or counted. If there were only monks in the priory, this one would
have very little to do in looking after the linen; but there are many
boys who, although they are being educated with a view to the
religious life, have not yet put off such worldly things as shirts.

Very different from the sombre-looking Franciscan, bent over the
wheelbarrow, is the Pиre Etienne. He is as cheerful and sprightly as
if he were now convinced that a convent is the pleasantest place on
earth to live in, and that outside of it all is vanity and vexation.
He teaches the boys Latin, Greek, English, and the physical sciences.
Although he has never been out of France and Italy, he can speak
English, and actually make himself understood. He is a botanist, and
he and I have already spent some hours together in his cell before a
table strewn with floras and plants, both dry and fresh. This time we
are joined by a young monk who has been gathering flowers on the banks
of the Tarn, and has placed them between the leaves of a great Latin
Bible.

These meetings, and the library of the priory, with its valuable works
by local historians, strengthened the spell by which Ambialet held me.
The monks whom one occasionally meets in Languedoc are generally men
of better culture than the ordinary rural clergy, most of whom show
plainly enough by their ideas and the vigorous expressions which they
rarely hesitate to use in any company that they are sons of the soil.
As priests, situated as they are, this coarseness of manners and
circumscribed range of ideas, so far from being a disadvantage, forms
a bond of union between them and the people. A man to be deeply pitied
is he who, having a really superior and cultivated mind, is charged
with the cure of souls in some forlorn parish where nobody has the
time or the taste to read. Such a priest must either bring his ideas
down to those of the people around him, or be content to live in
absolute intellectual isolation. He may turn to the companionship of
books, it is true, but his library is very small; and if, as is
probable, his income is not more than Ј40 a year, he is too poor to
add to it. Such a revenue, when the bare needs of the body have been
met, does not leave much for satisfying a literary appetite.

The priory of Nфtre Dame de l'Oder was founded in the twelfth or
thirteenth century by the Benedictines, but a church already existed
on the spot as early, it is supposed, as the eighth century. The one
now standing, and which became incorporated with the priory, probably
dates from the eleventh. If the interior is cold by the severity of
the lines scarcely broken by ornament, the artistic sense is warmed by
the beauty of the proportions and general disposition. The apse, with
its three little windows, has the perfect charm of grace and
simplicity. A structural peculiarity, to be especially noted as one of
the tentative efforts of Romanesque art, is the use of half-arches for
the vaulting of the two narrow aisles. Unfortunately, the plastering
mania, which has robbed the interior of so many French churches of
their venerable air, has not spared this one. A singularly broad
flight of steps, partly cut in the rock and covered with tiles, leads
up to the portal; but as the building has been closed to the public
since the application of the law dispersing religious communities,
these steps look as if they belonged to the Castle of Indolence, so
overgrown with grass are they and abandoned to the wandering
wild-flowers. Great mulleins have been allowed to spring up from the
gaps between the lichen-spotted tiles.

When there was a regular community of monks here, the ancient
pilgrimage to Nфtre 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 Nфtre Dame d'Ambialet was changed to
Nфtre 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 seize the beholder. As gay as any of the
cicadas that keep the summer's jubilee in the sunny tree-tops, he
sings songs that have nothing in common with psalms, and he needs
little provocation to dance. French has become an awkward language to
him, but his tongue is nimble enough both in Languedocian and Latin.
When he hears that the evening soup is ready, he hurries the pig home,
flourishes his stick above his head in imitation of the Arabs, and
shouts in his cheeriest voice, 'Oportet manducare!'

The other uncle's chief business is to look after a couple of cows,
and as the farm has no pasturage but the orchard, he is away with them
the greater part of the day along the banks of the Tarn. One evening I
met him by the river, and he stopped me to quote a passage from the
Georgics which he had recalled to mind. His face beamed with
satisfaction. I knew that he had not been brought up to cow-tending,
but was, nevertheless, taken aback when the unfortunate old bachelor
wished me to share the pleasure he felt in having brought to mind a
long-forgotten passage of Virgil. The surprises of real life never
cease to be startling. Speaking to me afterwards of the growing
extravagance of all classes, he said:

'When I was young there were only two _cafйs_ in Albi, and none but
the rich ever entered them. Now every man goes to his _cafй_. I
remember when, in middle-class families in easy circumstances, coffee
was only drunk two or three times a year, on festive occasions.' Very
different is the state of things now in France.

The figure of the old man bending upon his stick glides away by the
dark willow-fringe of the Tarn, and I am standing alone in the solemn
splendour of the luminous dusk--the clear-obscure of the quickly
passing twilight, beside the bearded corn, whose gold is blended with
the faint rosiness that spreads through the air of the valley, and
lets free the fragrance of those flowers which keep all their
sweetness for the evening. There is still a gleam of the lost sun upon
the priory walls, and over the dark rocks and wooded hollows floats a
purple haze. The dusk gathers apace, and the poplars that rise far
above the willows along the river, their outlines shaded away into the
black forest behind them, stand motionless like phantom trees, for not
a leaf stirs; but the corn seems to grow more luminous, as if it had
drunk something of the fire as well as the colour of the sun, while
the horns of the sinking moon gleam silver-bright just over the
topmost trees, painted in sepia upon a cobalt sky. How weird,
phantasmal, enigmatic the forms of those trees now appear! Some like
hell-hags, with wild hair flying, are rushing through the air; others,
majestic, solitary, wrapped about with dark horror, are the trees of
Fate; some have their arms raised in the frenzy of a torturing
passion; others look like emblems of Care when hope and passion are
alike dead: each touches the spring of a sombre thought or a fantastic
fancy.

On the road to Villefranche, about half a mile from Ambialet, is a
mine which has been abandoned from time immemorial, and which the
inhabitants say was worked by the English for gold. I have noticed,
however, throughout this part of France, that nearly everything that
was done in a remote age, whether good or evil, is attributed by the
people to the English, and that they not infrequently make a curious
confusion between Britons and Romans. As for the Visigoths,
Ostrogoths, and Arabs, all traditions respecting them appear to have
passed out of the popular mind. In the side of a stony hill on which
scarcely a plant grows, a narrow passage, a few feet wide, has been
quarried, and air shafts have been cut down into it through the solid
rock with prodigious labour. I followed this passage until a falling
in of the roof prevented me from going any farther. I could perceive
no trace of a metallic vein, so thoroughly had it been worked out, but
scattered over the hillside with schist, talcose slate, and fragments
of quartz, was a great deal of scoriae, showing that metal of some
kind had been excavated, and that the smelting had been done on the
spot. That the mine was worked for gold seems quite probable, inasmuch
as a lump of mineral containing a considerable quantity of the
precious metal was picked up near the entrance some years ago. Besides
the scoriae, I found upon the hillside much broken pottery, and from
the shape of several fragments it was easy to restore the form of
earthenware pots which were probably used for smelting purposes. There
is no record to show who the people were who were so busy upon these
rocks glittering with mica and talc. They may have belonged to any one
of the races who passed over the land from the time of the Romans.

One morning, still in the month of July, I broke away from the charms
of Ambialet, and shouldering again my old knapsack--which, by
travelling hundreds of miles in all weathers, had become disgracefully
shabby, but which was a friend too well stitched together to be thrown
aside on account of ill-looks--I continued my journey up the valley of
the Tarn. I had agreed to walk with the parish priest as far as the
village of Villeneuve, and having found him at the presbytery, we
passed through the churchyard on the edge of the rock. Here there is a
remarkable cross, with the figure of Christ on one side and that of
the Virgin on the other, not carved in relief, but in that early
mediaeval style which consisted of hollowing out the stone around the
image. The cure frankly declared that, if anyone offered him a large
new cross in the place of this little one, he would be glad to make
the exchange. It is unfortunate that so many rural priests place