church. Having climbed the steep and narrow street, I entered the most
wonderful Gothic building that has ever been erected to God on earth,
large as a town, and full of low rooms which seem buried beneath
vaulted roofs, and of lofty galleries supported by delicate columns.

I entered this gigantic granite jewel, which is as light in its effect
as a bit of lace and is covered with towers, with slender belfries to
which spiral staircases ascend. The flying buttresses raise strange
heads that bristle with chimeras, with devils, with fantastic ani-mals,
with monstrous flowers, are joined together by finely carved arches, to
the blue sky by day, and to the black sky by night.

When I had reached the summit. I said to the monk who accompanied me:
"Father, how happy you must be here!" And he replied: "It is very
windy, Monsieur"; and so we began to talk while watching the rising
tide, which ran over the sand and covered it with a steel cuirass.

And then the monk told me stories, all the old stories belonging to the
place--legends, nothing but legends.

One of them struck me forcibly. The country people, those belonging to
the Mornet, declare that at night one can hear talking going on in the
sand, and also that two goats bleat, one with a strong, the other with
a weak voice. Incredulous people declare that it is nothing but the
screaming of the sea birds, which occasionally resembles bleatings, and
occasionally human lamentations; but belated fishermen swear that they
have met an old shepherd, whose cloak covered head they can never see,
wandering on the sand, between two tides, round the little town placed
so far out of the world. They declare he is guiding and walking before
a he-goat with a man's face and a she-goat with a woman's face, both
with white hair, who talk incessantly, quarreling in a strange
language, and then suddenly cease talking in order to bleat with all
their might.

"Do you believe it?" I asked the monk. "I scarcely know," he replied;
and I continued: "If there are other beings besides ourselves on this
earth, how comes it that we have not known it for so long a time, or
why have you not seen them? How is it that I have not seen them?"

He replied: "Do we see the hundred-thousandth part of what exists? Look
here; there is the wind, which is the strongest force in nature. It
knocks down men, and blows down buildings, uproots trees, raises the
sea into mountains of water, destroys cliffs and casts gr