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, 20th 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 outlooksouthwardopening 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
seculardonkey 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