at the musicians
should be toads--yes, toads--the most despised and the most unjustly
treated of creatures!

This cottage is at Roc-Amadour, and before writing about the place I
cannot do better than go down to the level of the stream, and look up
at the amazing cluster of buildings clinging to the rocks on one side
of the gorge, while the old walls are whitened by the pale brilliancy
of the moon. Above the roofs of all the houses is a mass of masonry,
vast and heavy, pierced by narrow Romanesque windows--a building
uncouth and monstrous, like the surrounding crags. It stands upon a
ledge of the cliff, partly in the hollow of the rock, which, indeed,
forms its innermost wall. Higher still a great cross shows against the
sky, and near to it, upon the edge of the precipice, are the ramparts
of a mediaeval fortress, now combined with a modern building, which is
the residence of the clergy attached to the sanctuary of Notre Dame de
Roc-Amadour.

[Illustration: ROC-AMADOUR.]

The sanctuary--it is inside the massive pile under the beetling rock,
and over the roofs of the houses--explains why men in far-distant
times had the strange notion of gathering together and constructing
dwellings upon a spot where Nature must have offered the harshest
opposition to such a project. The chosen site was not only
precipitous, but lay in the midst of a calcareous desert, where no
stream nor spring of water could be relied upon for six months in the
year, and where the only soil that was not absolutely unproductive was
covered with dense forest infested by wolves.[*] And yet, in course of
time, there grew up upon these forbidding rocks, in the midst of this
desert, a little town that obtained a wide celebrity, and was even
fortified, as the five ruinous gateways, with towers along the line of
the single street, prove even now, notwithstanding the deplorable
recklessness with which the structures of the ancient burg have been
degraded or demolished during the last half-century. Nothing is more
certain than that the origin of Roc-Amadour, and the cause of its
development, were religious. It was called into existence by pilgrims;
it grew with the growth of pilgrimages, and if it were not for
pilgrims at the present day half the houses now occupied would be
allowed to fall into ruin. It is impossible to look at it without
wonder, either in the daylight or the moonlight. It appears to have
been wrenched out of the known order of human works--