felt. The traveller liked to linger here; in the day-time
when he peered vainly at the re-redos of Soler de Barcelona, at
Mass-time, when the lighted altar-candles glimmered over its fine old
marble, but best of all he liked to come at night. Those summer nights
in Rousillon were hot and full of the murmur of voices. The Cathedral
was the only silent place; more full than ever of the mysterious--the
felt and the unseen. As one entered, the sanctuary light shone as a star
out of a night of darkness; in a near-by chapel, a candle sputtered
itself away, and a woman--whether old or young one could not
see--lighted a fresh taper. Sometimes a man knelt and told his beads,
sometimes two women entered and separated for their differing needs and
prayers. Sometimes one sat in meditation, or knelt, unmoving, for a
space of time; once a child brought a new candle to Saint Antony; always
some one came or some one went, until the hour of closing. Then, the
bell was rung, the door shut by a hand but dimly seen, and the last few
watchers went out--across the little square, down this street or that,
until they were lost in the darkness of the summer's night.

[Illustration: "THE STONY STREET OF THE HILLSIDE."--CARCASSONNE.]

[Sidenote: Carcassonne.]

The train puffed into the station at Carcassonne, and the impatient
traveller, throwing his bags into an hotel omnibus, asked for the
Cathedral and walked eagerly on that he might the more quickly "see in
line the city on the hill," "the castle walls as grand as those of
Babylon," and "gaze at last on Carcassonne." His mind was full of the
poem, and faithfully following directions, he hurried through clean,
narrow streets until he came at length, not upon a poetic vision of
battlemented walls and towers, but on the most prosaic of boulevards and
the Church of Saint-Michel which has been the Cathedral since 1803, a
large, uncouth building with a big, unfinished tower. There is no facade
portal, and a small door-way in the north side leads into the great
vaulted hall, one of the most usual and commonplace forms of the Gothic
interior of the South. This room, which is painted, receives light from
a beautiful rose-window at the West, and a series of small roses, like
miniatures of the greater one, are cut in the upper walls of the nave;
and little chapels, characterised by the same heavy monotony which hangs
like a pall over the whole Cathedral, are lost in the church's capacious
flanks.