ays simply built, but here a rectangle, a low gabled roof, a small,
round-headed window in the wall, would have been architectural bareness
if a high, straight tower had not crowned it all. This crenellated tower
is a true type of its time, square, yet slim and strong, and crudely
graceful as some tall young poplar of the plains beneath. In the XI and
XII centuries, its early days, it was the city's lookout. Families lived
high up in its walls, and the traveller could imagine, in this little
old, deserted square, the crowds who gathered round the tower's base,
and called for news of enemies and battle as moderns gather about the
more prosaic bulletin of printed news. He could see them surging,
peering up; and from above he almost heard the watcher's cry, "They're
coming on,"--with the great answering howl beneath, and the rush to
arms. Or, "They pass us by," and then what breaking into little laughing
groups, what joy, what dancing, and what praying, that lasted far into
the evening hours.

[Illustration: "THE LOW, BROAD ARCHES AND THE GREAT, SUPPORTING
PILLARS."--VENCE.]

The traveller came back in thought to modern times and went into the
church, that church of five low naves and many restorations, that
product of most diverse fancies. It is painted in lugubrious white, and
its pillars have false bases in a palpable imitation of veined red
marble. Its pure and early form, the Latin cross, is gone, its fine old
stalls are hidden in a gallery, and at the altar Corinthian columns
desecrate its ancient Romanesque. Yet in spite of the incongruities the
atmosphere of the church is truly that of its dim past. There are the
low broad arches, the great, supporting pillars that are massive
buttresses; there is the simple practicality of a style that aimed at a
protecting strength rather than at any art of beauty; there is the
semi-darkness of the small, safe windows, and the little, guarded space
where the praying few increased a thousand-fold in times of danger. This
is, in spite of all defects, the small Provencal church where in days of
peace cloudy incense slowly circled round the shadowy forms of chanting
priests, and where in times of war a crowd of frightened women and their
children prayed in safety for the men who sallied forth to fight in
their defence.

[Sidenote: Grasse.]

He who is unloving of the past may well rush by its treasures in a
puffing automobile, he who is bored by olden thoughts can hurry on by
r