sh to cry,
but too much in haste to stop for tears. The priest watched him with a
kindly shrug and a smile as he ran on;--there was no time for laughing
or crying, there was time for nothing but the mysterious matter in hand.

"What is it?" the traveller finally asked.

"Ah, Monsieur, to-morrow is the day of the First Communion. We all have
just prayed, just confessed, in the church; and our parents are
arranging their places. For to-morrow there will be crowds--everybody.
You too, Monsieur, are coming perhaps? The Mass is at half-past six."

Such was the living interest of the place that the traveller moved away
without any very clear architectural impression of the Cathedral, except
of the curiously narrow bell-turret and of the height of the dome.

He did not see the early Mass, but toward ten wandered again to the
Cathedral and entered the cloister-door. It was a low-vaulted, sombre
little Cloister which all the chattering, animated crowds could not
brighten. Formerly two sides were gated off, and priests alone walked
there. The other sides were public passage-ways to the church. Now only
the iron grooves of the gates of separation remain, and the four walks
were thronged with people. Little girls in the white dresses of their
First Communion, veiled and crowned with roses, were hurrying to their
places; an old grandmother, with her arm around one of the little
communicants, knelt by a column, gazing up to the Virgin of the
cloister-close; proud and anxious parents led their children into
church, and friends met and kissed on both cheeks. In one corner, an old
woman was driving a busy trade in penny-worths of barley candy.
Diminutive altar-boys in white lace cassocks and red, fur-trimmed
capes, offered religious papers for sale. It was a harvest day for
beggars, and "for the love of the good God" many a sou was given into
feeble dirty hands.

[Illustration: "IT WAS A LOW-VAULTED, SOMBRE LITTLE CLOISTER."
CAVAILLON.]

For a time the traveller walked about the Cloister, so tiny and worn a
Cloister that on any other day it must have seemed melancholy indeed. So
low a vaulting is not often found, massive and rounded and seeming to
press, lowering, above the head. The columns, which help to support its
weight, are short and heavy and thick, so worn that their capitals are
sometimes only suggestive and sometimes meaningless. On one side the
carving is distinctly Corinthian; on another altogether lacking. Between
th