At last black trees began to show upon my left, and, suddenly crossing
the road, made a cave of unmitigated blackness right in front.  I call it
a cave without exaggeration; to pass below that arch of leaves was like
entering a dungeon.  I felt about until my hand encountered a stout
branch, and to this I tied Modestine, a haggard, drenched, desponding
donkey.  Then I lowered my pack, laid it along the wall on the margin of
the road, and unbuckled the straps.  I knew well enough where the lantern
was; but where were the candles?  I groped and groped among the tumbled
articles, and, while I was thus groping, suddenly I touched the spirit-
lamp.  Salvation!  This would serve my turn as well.  The wind roared
unwearyingly among the trees; I could hear the boughs tossing and the
leaves churning through half a mile of forest; yet the scene of my
encampment was not only as black as the pit, but admirably sheltered.  At
the second match the wick caught flame.  The light was both livid and
shifting; but it cut me off from the universe, and doubled the darkness
of the surrounding night.

I tied Modestine more conveniently for herself, and broke up half the
black bread for her supper, reserving the other half against the morning.
Then I gathered what I should want within reach, took off my wet boots
and gaiters, which I wrapped in my waterproof, arranged my knapsack for a
pillow under the flap of my sleeping-bag, insinuated my limbs into the
interior, and buckled myself in like a bambino.  I opened a tin of
Bologna sausage and broke a cake of chocolate, and that was all I had to
eat.  It may sound offensive, but I ate them together, bite by bite, by
way of bread and meat.  All I had to wash down this revolting mixture was
neat brandy: a revolting beverage in itself.  But I was rare and hungry;
ate well, and smoked one of the best cigarettes in my experience.  Then I
put a stone in my straw hat, pulled the flap of my fur cap over my neck
and eyes, put my revolver ready to my hand, and snuggled well down among
the sheepskins.

I questioned at first if I were sleepy, for I felt my heart beating
faster than usual, as if with an agreeable excitement to which my mind
remained a stranger.  But as soon as my eyelids touched, that subtle glue
leaped between them, and they would no more come separate.  The wind
among the trees was my lullaby.  Sometimes it sounded for minutes
together with a steady, even rush, not rising nor abating; and again it
would swell and burst like a great crashing breaker, and the trees would
patter me all over with big drops from the rain of the afternoon.  Night
after night, in my own bedroom in the country, I have given ear to this
perturbing concert of the wind among the woods; but whether it was a
difference in the trees, or the lie of the ground, or because I was
myself outside and in the midst of it, the fact remains that the wind
sang to a different tune among these woods of Gevaudan.  I hearkened and
hearkened; and meanwhile sleep took gradual possession of my body and
subdued my thoughts and senses; but still my last waking effort was to
listen and distinguish, and my last conscious state was one of wonder at
the foreign clamour in my ears.

Twice in the course of the dark hours--once when a stone galled me
underneath the sack, and again when the poor patient Modestine, growing
angry, pawed and stamped upon the road--I was recalled for a brief while
to consciousness, and saw a star or two overhead, and the lace-like edge
of the foliage against the sky.  When I awoke for the third time
(Wednesday, September 25th), the world was flooded with a blue light, the
mother of the dawn.  I saw the leaves labouring in the wind and the
ribbon of the road; and, on turning my head, there was Modestine tied to
a beech, and standing half across the path in an attitude of inimitable
patience.  I closed my eyes again, and set to thinking over the
experience of the night.  I was surprised to find how easy and pleasant
it had been, even in this tempestuous weather.  The stone which annoyed
me would not have been there, had I not been forced to camp blindfold in
the opaque night; and I had felt no other inconvenience, except when my
feet encountered the lantern or the second volume of Peyrat's Pastors of
the Desert among the mixed contents of my sleeping-bag; nay, more, I had
felt not a touch of cold, and awakened with unusually lightsome and clear
sensations.

With that, I shook myself, got once more into my boots and gaiters, and,
breaking up the rest of the bread for Modestine, strolled about to see in
what part of the world I had awakened.  Ulysses, left on Ithaca, and with
a mind unsettled by the goddess, was not more pleasantly astray.  I have
been after an adventure all my life, a pure dispassionate adventure, such
as befell early and heroic voyagers; and thus to be found by morning in a
random woodside nook in Gevaudan--not knowing north from south, as
strange to my surroundings as the first man upon the earth, an inland
castaway--was to find a fraction of my day-dreams realised.  I was on the
skirts of a little wood of birch, sprinkled with a few beeches; behind,
it adjoined another wood of fir; and in front, it broke up and went down
in open order into a shallow and meadowy dale.  All around there were
bare hilltops, some near, some far away, as the perspective closed or
opened, but none apparently much higher than the rest.  The wind huddled
the trees.  The golden specks of autumn in the birches tossed
shiveringly.  Overhead the sky was full of strings and shreds of vapour,
flying, vanishing, reappearing, and turning about an axis like tumblers,
as the wind hounded them through heaven.  It was wild weather and
famishing cold.  I ate some chocolate, swallowed a mouthful of brandy,
and smoked a cigarette before the cold should have time to disable my
fingers.  And by the time I had got all this done, and had made my pack
and bound it on the pack-saddle, the day was tiptoe on the threshold of
the east.  We had not gone many steps along the lane, before the sun,
still invisible to me, sent a glow of gold over some cloud mountains that
lay ranged along the eastern sky.

The wind had us on the stern, and hurried us bitingly forward.  I
buttoned myself into my coat, and walked on in a pleasant frame of mind
with all men, when suddenly, at a corner, there was Fouzilhic once more
in front of me.  Nor only that, but there was the old gentleman who had
escorted me so far the night before, running out of his house at sight of
me, with hands upraised in horror.

'My poor boy!' he cried, 'what does this mean?'

I told him what had happened.  He beat his old hands like clappers in a
mill, to think how lightly he had let me go; but when he heard of the man
of Fouzilhac, anger and depression seized upon his mind.

'This time, at least,' said he, 'there shall be no mistake.'

And he limped along, for he was very rheumatic, for about half a mile,
and until I was almost within sight of Cheylard, the destination I had
hunted for so long.



CHEYLARD AND LUC


Candidly, it seemed little worthy of all this searching.  A few broken
ends of village, with no particular street, but a succession of open
places heaped with logs and fagots; a couple of tilted crosses, a shrine
to Our Lady of all Graces on the summit of a little hill; and all this,
upon a rattling highland river, in the corner of a naked valley.  What
went ye out for to see? thought I to myself.  But the place had a life of
its own.  I found a board, commemorating the liberalities of Cheylard for
the past year, hung up, like a banner, in the diminutive and tottering
church.  In 1877, it appeared, the inhabitants subscribed forty-eight
francs ten centimes for the 'Work of the Propagation of the Faith.'  Some
of this, I could not help hoping, would be applied to my native land.
Cheylard scrapes together halfpence for the darkened souls in Edinburgh;
while Balquhidder and Dunrossness bemoan the ignorance of Rome.  Thus, to
the high entertainment of the angels, do we pelt each other with
evangelists, like schoolboys bickering in the snow.

The inn was again singularly unpretentious.  The whole furniture of a not
ill-to-do family was in the kitchen: the beds, the cradle, the clothes,
the plate-rack, the meal-chest, and the photograph of the parish priest.
There were five children, one of whom was set to its morning prayers at
the stair-foot soon after my arrival, and a sixth would ere long be
forthcoming.  I was kindly received by these good folk.  They were much
interested in my misadventure.  The wood in which I had slept belonged to
them; the man of Fouzilhac they thought a monster of iniquity, and
counselled me warmly to summon him at law--'because I might have died.'
The good wife was horror-stricken to see me drink over a pint of
uncreamed milk.

'You will do yourself an evil,' she said.  'Permit me to boil it for
you.'

After I had begun the morning on this delightful liquor, she having an
infinity of things to arrange, I was permitted, nay requested, to make a
bowl of chocolate for myself.  My boots and gaiters were hung up to dry,
and, seeing me trying to write my journal on my knee, the eldest daughter
let down a hinged table in the chimney-corner for my convenience.  Here I
wrote, drank my chocolate, and finally ate an omelette before I left.  The
table was thick with dust; for, as they explained, it was not used except
in winter weather.  I had a clear look up the vent, through brown
agglomerations of soot and blue vapour, to the sky; and whenever a
handful of twigs was thrown on to the fire, my legs were scorched by the
blaze.

The husband had begun life as a muleteer, and when I came to charge
Modestine showed himself full of the prudence of his art.  'You will have
to change this package,' said he; 'it ought to be in two parts, and then
you might have double the weight.'

I explained that I wanted no more weight; and for no donkey hitherto
created would I cut my sleeping-bag in two.

'It fatigues her, however,' said the innkeeper; 'it fatigues her greatly
on the march.  Look.'

Alas, there were her two forelegs no better than raw beef on the inside,
and blood was running from under her tail.  They told me when I started,
and I was ready to believe it, that before a few days I should come to
love Modestine like a dog.  Three days had passed, we had shared some
misadventures, and my heart was still as cold as a potato towards my
beast of burden.  She was pretty enough to look at; but then she had
given proof of dead stupidity, redeemed indeed by patience, but
aggravated by flashes of sorry and ill-judged light-heartedness.  And I
own this new discovery seemed another point against her.  What the devil
was the good of a she-ass if she could not carry a sleeping-bag and a few
necessaries?  I saw the end of the fable rapidly approaching, when I
should have to carry Modestine.  AEsop was the man to know the world!  I
assure you I set out with heavy thoughts upon my short day's march.

It was not only heavy thoughts about Modestine that weighted me upon the
way; it was a leaden business altogether.  For first, the wind blew so
rudely that I had to hold on the pack with one hand from Cheylard to Luc;
and second, my road lay through one of the most beggarly countries in the
world.  It was like the worst of the Scottish Highlands, only worse;
cold, naked, and ignoble, scant of wood, scant of heather, scant of life.
A road and some fences broke the unvarying waste, and the line of the
road was marked by upright pillars, to serve in time of snow.

Why any one should desire to visit either Luc or Cheylard is more than my
much-inventing spirit can suppose.  For my part, I travel not to go
anywhere, but to go.  I travel for travel's sake.  The great affair is to
move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down
off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite
underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.  Alas, as we get up in life,
and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that
must be worked for.  To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out
of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to
occupy and compose the mind.  And when the present is so exacting, who
can annoy himself about the future?

I came out at length above the Allier.  A more unsightly prospect at this
season of the year it would be hard to fancy.  Shelving hills rose round
it on all sides, here dabbled with wood and fields, there rising to peaks
alternately naked and hairy with pines.  The colour throughout was black
or ashen, and came to a point in the ruins of the castle of Luc, which
pricked up impudently from below my feet, carrying on a pinnacle a tall
white statue of Our Lady, which, I heard with interest, weighed fifty
quintals, and was to be dedicated on the 6th of October.  Through this
sorry landscape trickled the Allier and a tributary of nearly equal size,
which came down to join it through a broad nude valley in Vivarais.  The
weather had somewhat lightened, and the clouds massed in squadron; but
the fierce wind still hunted them through heaven, and cast great ungainly
splashes of shadow and sunlight over the scene.

Luc itself was a straggling double file of houses wedged between hill and
river.  It had no beauty, nor was there any notable feature, save the old
castle overhead with its fifty quintals of brand-new Madonna.  But the
inn was clean and large.  The kitchen, with its two box-beds hung with
clean check curtains, with its wide stone chimney, its chimney-shelf four
yards long and garnished with lanterns and religious statuettes, its
array of chests and pair of ticking clocks, was the very model of what a
kitchen ought to be; a melodrama kitchen, suitable for bandits or
noblemen in disguise.  Nor was the scene disgraced by the landlady, a
handsome, silent, dark old woman, clothed and hooded in black like a nun.
Even the public bedroom had a character of its own, with the long deal
tables and benches, where fifty might have dined, set out as for a
harvest-home, and the three box-beds along the wall.  In one of these,
lying on straw and covered with a pair of table-napkins, did I do penance
all night long in goose-flesh and chattering teeth, and sigh, from time
to time as I awakened, for my sheepskin sack and the lee of some great
wood.




OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS


         'I behold
   The House, the Brotherhood austere--
   And what am I, that I am here?'

   MATTHEW ARNOLD.



FATHER APOLLINARIS


Next morning (Thursday, 26th September) I took the road in a new order.
The sack was no longer doubled, but hung at full length across the
saddle, a green sausage six feet long with a tuft of blue wool hanging
out of either end.  It was more picturesque, it spared the donkey, and,
as I began to see, it would ensure stability, blow high, blow low.  But
it was not without a pang that I had so decided.  For although I had
purchased a new cord, and made all as fast as I was able, I was yet
jealously uneasy lest the flaps should tumble out and scatter my effects
along the line of march.

My way lay up the bald valley of the river, along the march of Vivarais
and Gevaudan.  The hills of Gevaudan on the right were a little more
naked, if anything, than those of Vivarais upon the left, and the former
had a monopoly of a low dotty underwood that grew thickly in the gorges
and died out in solitary burrs upon the shoulders and the summits.  Black
bricks of fir-wood were plastered here and there upon both sides, and
here and there were cultivated fields.  A railway ran beside the river;
the only bit of railway in Gevaudan, although there are many proposals
afoot and surveys being made, and even, as they tell me, a station
standing ready built in Mende.  A year or two hence and this may be
another world.  The desert is beleaguered.  Now may some Languedocian
Wordsworth turn the sonnet into patois: 'Mountains and vales and floods,
heard YE that whistle?'

At a place called La Bastide I was directed to leave the river, and
follow a road that mounted on the left among the hills of Vivarais, the
modern Ardeche; for I was now come within a little way of my strange
destination, the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of the Snows.  The sun
came out as I left the shelter of a pine-wood, and I beheld suddenly a
fine wild landscape to the south.  High rocky hills, as blue as sapphire,
closed the view, and between these lay ridge upon ridge, heathery,
craggy, the sun glittering on veins of rock, the underwood clambering in
the hollows, as rude as God made them at the first.  There was not a sign
of man's hand in all the prospect; and indeed not a trace of his passage,
save where generation after generation had walked in twisted footpaths,
in and out among the beeches, and up and down upon the channelled slopes.
The mists, which had hitherto beset me, were now broken into clouds, and
fled swiftly and shone brightly in the sun.  I drew a long breath.  It
was grateful to come, after so long, upon a scene of some attraction for
the human heart.  I own I like definite form in what my eyes are to rest
upon; and if landscapes were sold, like the sheets of characters of my
boyhood, one penny plain and twopence coloured, I should go the length of
twopence every day of my life.

But if things had grown better to the south, it was still desolate and
inclement near at hand.  A spidery cross on every hill-top marked the
neighbourhood of a religious house; and a quarter of a mile beyond, the
outlook southward opening out and growing bolder with every step, a white
statue of the Virgin at the corner of a young plantation directed the
traveller to Our Lady of the Snows.  Here, then, I struck leftward, and
pursued my way, driving my secular donkey before me, and creaking in my
secular boots and gaiters, towards the asylum of silence.

I had not gone very far ere the wind brought to me the clanging of a
bell, and somehow, I can scarce tell why, my heart sank within me at the
sound.  I have rarely approached anything with more unaffected terror
than the monastery of Our Lady of the Snows.  This it is to have had a
Protestant education.  And suddenly, on turning a corner, fear took hold
on me from head to foot--slavish, superstitious fear; and though I did
not stop in my advance, yet I went on slowly, like a man who should have
passed a bourne unnoticed, and strayed into the country of the dead.  For
there, upon the narrow new-made road, between the stripling pines, was a
mediaeval friar, fighting with a barrowful of turfs.  Every Sunday of my
childhood I used to study the Hermits of Marco Sadeler--enchanting
prints, full of wood and field and mediaeval landscapes, as large as a
county, for the imagination to go a-travelling in; and here, sure enough,
was one of Marco Sadeler's heroes.  He was robed in white like any
spectre, and the hood falling back, in the instancy of his contention
with the barrow, disclosed a pate as bald and yellow as a skull.  He
might have been buried any time these thousand years, and all the lively
parts of him resolved into earth and broken up with the farmer's harrow.

I was troubled besides in my mind as to etiquette.  Durst I address a
person who was under a vow of silence?  Clearly not.  But drawing near, I
doffed my cap to him with a far-away superstitious reverence.  He nodded
back, and cheerfully addressed me.  Was I going to the monastery?  Who
was I?  An Englishman?  Ah, an Irishman, then?

'No,' I said, 'a Scotsman.'

A Scotsman?  Ah, he had never seen a Scotsman before.  And he looked me
all over, his good, honest, brawny countenance shining with interest, as
a boy might look upon a lion or an alligator.  From him I learned with
disgust that I could not be received at Our Lady of the Snows; I might
get a meal, perhaps, but that was all.  And then, as our talk ran on, and
it turned out that I was not a pedlar, but a literary man, who drew
landscapes and was going to write a book, he changed his manner of
thinking as to my reception (for I fear they respect persons even in a
Trappist monastery), and told me I must be sure to ask for the Father
Prior, and state my case to him in full.  On second thoughts he
determined to go down with me himself; he thought he could manage for me
better.  Might he say that I was a geographer?

No; I thought, in the interests of truth, he positively might not.

'Very well, then' (with disappointment), 'an author.'

It appeared he had been in a seminary with six young Irishmen, all
priests long since, who had received newspapers and kept him informed of
the state of ecclesiastical affairs in England.  And he asked me eagerly
after Dr. Pusey, for whose conversion the good man had continued ever
since to pray night and morning.

'I thought he was very near the truth,' he said; 'and he will reach it
yet; there is so much virtue in prayer.'

He must be a stiff, ungodly Protestant who can take anything but pleasure
in this kind and hopeful story.  While he was thus near the subject, the
good father asked me if I were a Christian; and when he found I was not,
or not after his way, he glossed it over with great good-will.

The road which we were following, and which this stalwart father had made
with his own two hands within the space of a year, came to a corner, and
showed us some white buildings a little farther on beyond the wood.  At
the same time, the bell once more sounded abroad.  We were hard upon the
monastery.  Father Apollinaris (for that was my companion's name) stopped
me.

'I must not speak to you down there,' he said.  'Ask for the Brother
Porter, and all will be well.  But try to see me as you go out again
through the wood, where I may speak to you.  I am charmed to have made
your acquaintance.'

And then suddenly raising his arms, flapping his fingers, and crying out
twice, 'I must not speak, I must not speak!' he ran away in front of me,
and disappeared into the monastery door.

I own this somewhat ghastly eccentricity went a good way to revive my
terrors.  But where one was so good and simple, why should not all be
alike?  I took heart of grace, and went forward to the gate as fast as
Modestine, who seemed to have a disaffection for monasteries, would
permit.  It was the first door, in my acquaintance of her, which she had
not shown an indecent haste to enter.  I summoned the place in form,
though with a quaking heart.  Father Michael, the Father Hospitaller, and
a pair of brown-robed brothers came to the gate and spoke with me a
while.  I think my sack was the great attraction; it had already beguiled
the heart of poor Apollinaris, who had charged me on my life to show it
to the Father Prior.  But whether it was my address, or the sack, or the
idea speedily published among that part of the brotherhood who attend on
strangers that I was not a pedlar after all, I found no difficulty as to
my reception.  Modestine was led away by a layman to the stables, and I
and my pack were received into Our Lady of the Snows.



THE MONKS


Father Michael, a pleasant, fresh-faced, smiling man, perhaps of thirty-
five, took me to the pantry, and gave me a glass of liqueur to stay me
until dinner.  We had some talk, or rather I should say he listened to my
prattle indulgently enough, but with an abstracted air, like a spirit
with a thing of clay.  And truly, when I remember that I descanted
principally on my appetite, and that it must have been by that time more
than eighteen hours since Father Michael had so much as broken bread, I
can well understand that he would find an earthly savour in my
conversation.  But his manner, though superior, was exquisitely gracious;
and I find I have a lurking curiosity as to Father Michael's past.

The whet administered, I was left alone for a little in the monastery
garden.  This is no more than the main court, laid out in sandy paths and
beds of parti-coloured dahlias, and with a fountain and a black statue of
the Virgin in the centre.  The buildings stand around it four-square,
bleak, as yet unseasoned by the years and weather, and with no other
features than a belfry and a pair of slated gables.  Brothers in white,
brothers in brown, passed silently along the sanded alleys; and when I
first came out, three hooded monks were kneeling on the terrace at their
prayers.  A naked hill commands the monastery upon one side, and the wood
commands it on the other.  It lies exposed to wind; the snow falls off
and on from October to May, and sometimes lies six weeks on end; but if
they stood in Eden, with a climate like heaven's, the buildings
themselves would offer the same wintry and cheerless aspect; and for my
part, on this wild September day, before I was called to dinner, I felt
chilly in and out.

When I had eaten well and heartily, Brother Ambrose, a hearty conversible
Frenchman (for all those who wait on strangers have the liberty to
speak), led me to a little room in that part of the building which is set
apart for MM. les retraitants.  It was clean and whitewashed, and
furnished with strict necessaries, a crucifix, a bust of the late Pope,
the Imitation in French, a book of religious meditations, and the Life of
Elizabeth Seton, evangelist, it would appear, of North America and of New
England in particular.  As far as my experience goes, there is a fair
field for some more evangelisation in these quarters; but think of Cotton
Mather!  I should like to give him a reading of this little work in
heaven, where I hope he dwells; but perhaps he knows all that already,
and much more; and perhaps he and Mrs. Seton are the dearest friends, and
gladly unite their voices in the everlasting psalm.  Over the table, to
conclude the inventory of the room, hung a set of regulations for MM. les
retraitants: what services they should attend, when they were to tell
their beads or meditate, and when they were to rise and go to rest.  At
the foot was a notable N.B.: 'Le temps libre est employe a l'examen de
conscience, a la confession, a faire de bonnes resolutions, etc.'  To
make good resolutions, indeed!  You might talk as fruitfully of making
the hair grow on your head.

I had scarce explored my niche when Brother Ambrose returned.  An English
boarder, it appeared, would like to speak with me.  I professed my
willingness, and the friar ushered in a fresh, young, little Irishman of
fifty, a deacon of the Church, arrayed in strict canonicals, and wearing
on his head what, in default of knowledge, I can only call the
ecclesiastical shako.  He had lived seven years in retreat at a convent
of nuns in Belgium, and now five at Our Lady of the Snows; he never saw
an English newspaper; he spoke French imperfectly, and had he spoken it
like a native, there was not much chance of conversation where he dwelt.
With this, he was a man eminently sociable, greedy of news, and simple-
minded like a child.  If I was pleased to have a guide about the
monastery, he was no less delighted to see an English face and hear an
English tongue.

He showed me his own room, where he passed his time among breviaries,
Hebrew Bibles, and the Waverley Novels.  Thence he led me to the
cloisters, into the chapter-house, through the vestry, where the
brothers' gowns and broad straw hats were hanging up, each with his
religious name upon a board--names full of legendary suavity and
interest, such as Basil, Hilarion, Raphael, or Pacifique; into the
library, where were all the works of Veuillot and Chateaubriand, and the
Odes et Ballades, if you please, and even Moliere, to say nothing of
innumerable fathers and a great variety of local and general historians.
Thence my good Irishman took me round the workshops, where brothers bake
bread, and make cartwheels, and take photographs; where one superintends
a collection of curiosities, and another a gallery of rabbits.  For in a
Trappist monastery each monk has an occupation of his own choice, apart
from his religious duties and the general labours of the house.  Each
must sing in the choir, if he has a voice and ear, and join in the
haymaking if he has a hand to stir; but in his private hours, although he
must be occupied, he may be occupied on what he likes.  Thus I was told
that one brother was engaged with literature; while Father Apollinaris
busies himself in making roads, and the Abbot employs himself in binding
books.  It is not so long since this Abbot was consecrated, by the way;
and on that occasion, by a special grace, his mother was permitted to
enter the chapel and witness the ceremony of consecration.  A proud day
for her to have a son a mitred abbot; it makes you glad to think they let
her in.

In all these journeyings to and fro, many silent fathers and brethren
fell in our way.  Usually they paid no more regard to our passage than if
we had been a cloud; but sometimes the good deacon had a permission to
ask of them, and it was granted by a peculiar movement of the hands,
almost like that of a dog's paws in swimming, or refused by the usual
negative signs, and in either case with lowered eyelids and a certain air
of contrition, as of a man who was steering very close to evil.

The monks, by special grace of their Abbot, were still taking two meals a
day; but it was already time for their grand fast, which begins somewhere
in September and lasts till Easter, and during which they eat but once in
the twenty-four hours, and that at two in the afternoon, twelve hours
after they have begun the toil and vigil of the day.  Their meals are
scanty, but even of these they eat sparingly; and though each is allowed
a small carafe of wine, many refrain from this indulgence.  Without
doubt, the most of mankind grossly overeat themselves; our meals serve
not only for support, but as a hearty and natural diversion from the
labour of life.  Yet, though excess may be hurtful, I should have thought
this Trappist regimen defective.  And I am astonished, as I look back, at
the freshness of face and cheerfulness of manner of all whom I beheld.  A
happier nor a healthier company I should scarce suppose that I have ever
seen.  As a matter of fact, on this bleak upland, and with the incessant
occupation of the monks, life is of an uncertain tenure, and death no
infrequent visitor, at Our Lady of the Snows.  This, at least, was what
was told me.  But if they die easily, they must live healthily in the
meantime, for they seemed all firm of flesh and high in colour; and the
only morbid sign that I could observe, an unusual brilliancy of eye, was
one that served rather to increase the general impression of vivacity and
strength.

Those with whom I spoke were singularly sweet-tempered, with what I can
only call a holy cheerfulness in air and conversation.  There is a note,
in the direction to visitors, telling them not to be offended at the curt
speech of those who wait upon them, since it is proper to monks to speak
little.  The note might have been spared; to a man the hospitallers were
all brimming with innocent talk, and, in my experience of the monastery,
it was easier to begin than to break off a conversation.  With the
exception of Father Michael, who was a man of the world, they showed
themselves full of kind and healthy interest in all sorts of subjects--in
politics, in voyages, in my sleeping-sack--and not without a certain
pleasure in the sound of their own voices.

As for those who are restricted to silence, I can only wonder how they
bear their solemn and cheerless isolation.  And yet, apart from any view
of mortification, I can see a certain policy, not only in the exclusion
of women, but in this vow of silence.  I have had some experience of lay
phalansteries, of an artistic, not to say a bacchanalian character; and
seen more than one association easily formed and yet more easily
dispersed.  With a Cistercian rule, perhaps they might have lasted
longer.  In the neighbourhood of women it is but a touch-and-go
association that can be formed among defenceless men; the stronger
electricity is sure to triumph; the dreams of boyhood, the schemes of
youth, are abandoned after an interview of ten minutes, and the arts and
sciences, and professional male jollity, deserted at once for two sweet
eyes and a caressing accent.  And next after this, the tongue is the
great divider.

I am almost ashamed to pursue this worldly criticism of a religious rule;
but there is yet another point in which the Trappist order appeals to me
as a model of wisdom.  By two in the morning the clapper goes upon the
bell, and so on, hour by hour, and sometimes quarter by quarter, till
eight, the hour of rest; so infinitesimally is the day divided among
different occupations.  The man who keeps rabbits, for example, hurries
from his hutches to the chapel, the chapter-room, or the refectory, all
day long: every hour he has an office to sing, a duty to perform; from
two, when he rises in the dark, till eight, when he returns to receive
the comfortable gift of sleep, he is upon his feet and occupied with
manifold and changing business.  I know many persons, worth several
thousands in the year, who are not so fortunate in the disposal of their
lives.  Into how many houses would not the note of the monastery bell,
dividing the day into manageable portions, bring peace of mind and
healthful activity of body!  We speak of hardships, but the true hardship
is to be a dull fool, and permitted to mismanage life in our own dull and
foolish manner.

From this point of view, we may perhaps better understand the monk's
existence.  A long novitiate and every proof of constancy of mind and
strength of body is required before admission to the order; but I could
not find that many were discouraged.  In the photographer's studio, which
figures so strangely among the outbuildings, my eye was attracted by the
portrait of a young fellow in the uniform of a private of foot.  This was
one of the novices, who came of the age for service, and marched and
drilled and mounted guard for the proper time among the garrison of
Algiers.  Here was a man who had surely seen both sides of life before
deciding; yet as soon as he was set free from service he returned to
finish his novitiate.

This austere rule entitles a man to heaven as by right.  When the
Trappist sickens, he quits not his habit; he lies in the bed of death as
he has prayed and laboured in his frugal and silent existence; and when
the Liberator comes, at the very moment, even before they have carried
him in his robe to lie his little last in the chapel among continual
chantings, joy-bells break forth, as if for a marriage, from the slated
belfry, and proclaim throughout the neighbourhood that another soul has
gone to God.

At night, under the conduct of my kind Irishman, I took my place in the
gallery to hear compline and Salve Regina, with which the Cistercians
bring every day to a conclusion.  There were none of those circumstances
which strike the Protestant as childish or as tawdry in the public
offices of Rome.  A stern simplicity, heightened by the romance of the
surroundings, spoke directly to the heart.  I recall the whitewashed
chapel, the hooded figures in the choir, the lights alternately occluded
and revealed, the strong manly singing, the silence that ensued, the
sight of cowled heads bowed in prayer, and then the clear trenchant
beating of the bell, breaking in to show that the last office was over
and the hour of sleep had come; and when I remember, I am not surprised
that I made my escape into the court with somewhat whirling fancies, and
stood like a man bewildered in the windy starry night.

But I was weary; and when I had quieted my spirits with Elizabeth Seton's
memoirs--a dull work--the cold and the raving of the wind among the pines
(for my room was on that side of the monastery which adjoins the woods)
disposed me readily to slumber.  I was wakened at black midnight, as it
seemed, though it was really two in the morning, by the first stroke upon
the bell.  All the brothers were then hurrying to the chapel; the dead in
life, at this untimely hour, were already beginning the uncomforted
labours of their day.  The dead in life--there was a chill reflection.
And the words of a French song came back into my memory, telling of the
best of our mixed existence:

   'Que t'as de belles filles,
         Girofle!
         Girofla!
   Que t'as de belles filles,
   L'Amour let comptera!'

And I blessed God that I was free to wander, free to hope, and free to
love.



THE BOARDERS


But there was another side to my residence at Our Lady of the Snows.  At
this late season there were not many boarders; and yet I was not alone in
the public part of the monastery.  This itself is hard by the gate, with
a small dining-room on the ground-floor and a whole corridor of cells
similar to mine upstairs.  I have stupidly forgotten the board for a
regular retraitant; but it was somewhere between three and five francs a
day, and I think most probably the first.  Chance visitors like myself
might give what they chose as a free-will offering, but nothing was
demanded.  I may mention that when I was going away, Father Michael
refused twenty francs as excessive.  I explained the reasoning which led
me to offer him so much; but even then, from a curious point of honour,
he would not accept it with his own hand.  'I have no right to refuse for
the monastery,' he explained, 'but I should prefer if you would give it
to one of the brothers.'

I had dined alone, because I arrived late; but at supper I found two
other guests.  One was a country parish priest, who had walked over that
morning from the seat of his cure near Mende to enjoy four days of
solitude and prayer.  He was a grenadier in person, with the hale colour
and circular wrinkles of a peasant; and as he complained much of how he
had been impeded by his skirts upon the march, I have a vivid fancy
portrait of him, striding along, upright, big-boned, with kilted cassock,
through the bleak hills of Gevaudan.  The other was a short, grizzling,
thick-set man, from forty-five to fifty, dressed in tweed with a knitted
spencer, and the red ribbon of a decoration in his button-hole.  This
last was a hard person to classify.  He was an old soldier, who had seen
service and risen to the rank of commandant; and he retained some of the
brisk decisive manners of the camp.  On the other hand, as soon as his
resignation was accepted, he had come to Our Lady of the Snows as a
boarder, and, after a brief experience of its ways, had decided to remain
as a novice.  Already the new life was beginning to modify his
appearance; already he had acquired somewhat of the quiet and smiling air
of the brethren; and he was as yet neither an officer nor a Trappist, but
partook of the character of each.  And certainly here was a man in an
interesting nick of life.  Out of the noise of cannon and trumpets, he
was in the act of passing into this still country bordering on the grave,
where men sleep nightly in their grave-clothes, and, like phantoms,
communicate by signs.

At supper we talked politics.  I make it my business, when I am in
France, to preach political good-will and moderation, and to dwell on the
example of Poland, much as some alarmists in England dwell on the example
of Carthage.  The priest and the commandant assured me of their sympathy
with all I said, and made a heavy sighing over the bitterness of
contemporary feeling.

'Why, you cannot say anything to a man with which he does not absolutely
agree,' said I, 'but he flies up at you in a temper.'

They both declared that such a state of things was antichristian.

While we were thus agreeing, what should my tongue stumble upon but a
word in praise of Gambetta's moderation.  The old soldier's countenance
was instantly suffused with blood; with the palms of his hands he beat
the table like a naughty child.

'Comment, monsieur?' he shouted.  'Comment?  Gambetta moderate?  Will you
dare to justify these words?'

But the priest had not forgotten the tenor of our talk.  And suddenly, in
the height of his fury, the old soldier found a warning look directed on
his face; the absurdity of his behaviour was brought home to him in a
flash; and the storm came to an abrupt end, without another word.

It was only in the morning, over our coffee (Friday, September 27th),
that this couple found out I was a heretic.  I suppose I had misled them
by some admiring expressions as to the monastic life around us; and it
was only by a point-blank question that the truth came out.  I had been
tolerantly used both by simple Father Apollinaris and astute Father
Michael; and the good Irish deacon, when he heard of my religious
weakness, had only patted me upon the shoulder and said, 'You must be a
Catholic and come to heaven.'  But I was now among a different sect of
orthodox.  These two men were bitter and upright and narrow, like the
worst of Scotsmen, and indeed, upon my heart, I fancy they were worse.
The priest snorted aloud like a battle-horse.

'Et vous pretendez mourir dans cette espece de croyance?' he demanded;
and there is no type used by mortal printers large enough to qualify his
accent.

I humbly indicated that I had no design of changing.

But he could not away with such a monstrous attitude.  'No, no,' he
cried; 'you must change.  You have come here, God has led you here, and
you must embrace the opportunity.'

I made a slip in policy; I appealed to the family affections, though I
was speaking to a priest and a soldier, two classes of men
circumstantially divorced from the kind and homely ties of life.

'Your father and mother?' cried the priest.  'Very well; you will convert
them in their turn when you go home.'

I think I see my father's face!  I would rather tackle the Gaetulian lion
in his den than embark on such an enterprise against the family
theologian.

But now the hunt was up; priest and soldier were in full cry for my
conversion; and the Work of the Propagation of the Faith, for which the
people of Cheylard subscribed forty-eight francs ten centimes during
1877, was being gallantly pursued against myself.  It was an odd but most
effective proselytising.  They never sought to convince me in argument,
where I might have attempted some defence; but took it for granted that I
was both ashamed and terrified at my position, and urged me solely on the
point of time.  Now, they said, when God had led me to Our Lady of the
Snows, now was the appointed hour.

'Do not be withheld by false shame,' observed the priest, for my
encouragement.

For one who feels very similarly to all sects of religion, and who has
never been able, even for a moment, to weigh seriously the merit of this
or that creed on the eternal side of things, however much he may see to
praise or blame upon the secular and temporal side, the situation thus
created was both unfair and painful.  I committed my second fault in
tact, and tried to plead that it was all the same thing in the end, and
we were all drawing near by different sides to the same kind and
undiscriminating Friend and Father.  That, as it seems to lay spirits,
would be the only gospel worthy of the name.  But different men think
differently; and this revolutionary aspiration brought down the priest
with all the terrors of the law.  He launched into harrowing details of
hell.  The damned, he said--on the authority of a little book which he
had read not a week before, and which, to add conviction to conviction,
he had fully intended to bring along with him in his pocket--were to
occupy the same attitude through all eternity in the midst of dismal
tortures.  And as he thus expatiated, he grew in nobility of aspect with
his enthusiasm.

As a result the pair concluded that I should seek out the Prior, since
the Abbot was from home, and lay my case immediately before him.

'C'est mon conseil comme ancien militaire,' observed the commandant; 'et
celui de monsieur comme pretre.'

'Oui,' added the cure, sententiously nodding; 'comme ancien militaire--et
comme pretre.'

At this moment, whilst I was somewhat embarrassed how to answer, in came
one of the monks, a little brown fellow, as lively as a grig, and with an
Italian accent, who threw himself at once into the contention, but in a
milder and more persuasive vein, as befitted one of these pleasant
brethren.  Look at him, he said.  The rule was very hard; he would have
dearly liked to stay in his own country, Italy--it was well known how
beautiful it was, the beautiful Italy; but then there were no Trappists
in Italy; and he had a soul to save; and here he was.

I am afraid I must be at bottom, what a cheerful Indian critic has dubbed
me, 'a faddling hedonist,' for this description of the brother's motives
gave me somewhat of a shock.  I should have preferred to think he had
chosen the life for its own sake, and not for ulterior purposes; and this
shows how profoundly I was out of sympathy with these good Trappists,
even when I was doing my best to sympathise.  But to the cure the
argument seemed decisive.

'Hear that!' he cried.  'And I have seen a marquis here, a marquis, a
marquis'--he repeated the holy word three times over--'and other persons
high in society; and generals.  And here, at your side, is this
gentleman, who has been so many years in armies--decorated, an old
warrior.  And here he is, ready to dedicate himself to God.'

I was by this time so thoroughly embarrassed that I pled cold feet, and
made my escape from the apartment.  It was a furious windy morning, with
a sky much cleared, and long and potent intervals of sunshine; and I
wandered until dinner in the wild country towards the east, sorely
staggered and beaten upon by the gale, but rewarded with some striking
views.

At dinner the Work of the Propagation of the Faith was recommenced, and
on this occasion still more distastefully to me.  The priest asked me
many questions as to the contemptible faith of my fathers, and received
my replies with a kind of ecclesiastical titter.

'Your sect,' he said once; 'for I think you will admit it would be doing
it too much honour to call it a religion.'

'As you please, monsieur,' said I.  'La parole est a vous.'

At length I grew annoyed beyond endurance; and although he was on his own
ground and, what is more to the purpose, an old man, and so holding a
claim upon my toleration, I could not avoid a protest against this
uncivil usage.  He was sadly discountenanced.

'I assure you,' he said, 'I have no inclination to laugh in my heart.  I
have no other feeling but interest in your soul.'

And there ended my conversion.  Honest man! he was no dangerous deceiver;
but a country parson, full of zeal and faith.  Long may he tread Gevaudan
with his kilted skirts--a man strong to walk and strong to comfort his
parishioners in death!  I daresay he would beat bravely through a
snowstorm where his duty called him; and it is not always the most
faithful believer who makes the cunningest apostle.



UPPER GEVAUDAN (continued)


   The bed was made, the room was fit,
   By punctual eve the stars were lit;
   The air was still, the water ran;
   No need there was for maid or man,
   When we put up, my ass and I,
   At God's green caravanserai.

   OLD PLAY.



ACROSS THE GOULET


The wind fell during dinner, and the sky remained clear; so it was under
better auspices that I loaded Modestine before the monastery gate.  My
Irish friend accompanied me so far on the way.  As we came through the
wood, there was Pere Apollinaire hauling his barrow; and he too quitted
his labours to go with me for perhaps a hundred yards, holding my hand
between both of his in front of him.  I parted first from one and then
from the other with unfeigned regret, but yet with the glee of the
traveller who shakes off the dust of one stage before hurrying forth upon
another.  Then Modestine and I mounted the course of the Allier, which
here led us back into Gevaudan towards its sources in the forest of
Mercoire.  It was but an inconsiderable burn before we left its guidance.
Thence, over a hill, our way lay through a naked plateau, until we
reached Chasserades at sundown.

The company in the inn kitchen that night were all men employed in survey
for one of the projected railways.  They were intelligent and
conversible, and we decided the future of France over hot wine, until the
state of the clock frightened us to rest.  There were four beds in the
little upstairs room; and we slept six.  But I had a bed to myself, and
persuaded them to leave the window open.

'He, bourgeois; il est cinq heures!' was the cry that wakened me in the
morning (Saturday, September 28th).  The room was full of a transparent
darkness, which dimly showed me the other three beds and the five
different nightcaps on the pillows.  But out of the window the dawn was
growing ruddy in a long belt over the hill-tops, and day was about to
flood the plateau.  The hour was inspiriting; and there seemed a promise
of calm weather, which was perfectly fulfilled.  I was soon under way
with Modestine.  The road lay for a while over the plateau, and then
descended through a precipitous village into the valley of the Chassezac.
This stream ran among green meadows, well hidden from the world by its
steep banks; the broom was in flower, and here and there was a hamlet
sending up its smoke.

At last the path crossed the Chassezac upon a bridge, and, forsaking this
deep hollow, set itself to cross the mountain of La Goulet.  It wound up
through Lestampes by upland fields and woods of beech and birch, and with
every corner brought me into an acquaintance with some new interest.  Even
in the gully of the Chassezac my ear had been struck by a noise like that
of a great bass bell ringing at the distance of many miles; but this, as
I continued to mount and draw nearer to it, seemed to change in
character, and I found at length that it came from some one leading
flocks afield to the note of a rural horn.  The narrow street of
Lestampes stood full of sheep, from wall to wall--black sheep and white,
bleating with one accord like the birds in spring, and each one
accompanying himself upon the sheep-bell round his neck.  It made a
pathetic concert, all in treble.  A little higher, and I passed a pair of
men in a tree with pruning-hooks, and one of them was singing the music
of a bourree.  Still further, and when I was already threading the
birches, the crowing of cocks came cheerfully up to my ears, and along
with that the voice of a flute discoursing a deliberate and plaintive air
from one of the upland villages.  I pictured to myself some grizzled,
apple-cheeked, country schoolmaster fluting in his bit of a garden in the
clear autumn sunshine.  All these beautiful and interesting sounds filled
my heart with an unwonted expectation; and it appeared to me that, once
past this range which I was mounting, I should descend into the garden of
the world.  Nor was I deceived, for I was now done with rains and winds
and a bleak country.  The first part of my journey ended here; and this
was like an induction of sweet sounds into the other and more beautiful.