modation in the inns that they use the church
by night as well as by day, but because they wish to go through their
devotional programme thoroughly. And those who go to the inns often
make one room serve for a family of three or four grown-up persons.
If there vis one person who does not belong to the family, the others
see no harm in admitting him or her; indeed, they think that as
Christians they are almost bound to do so.

On the night following the opening of the retreat, Roc-Amadour is
illuminated, and the spectacle is one that renders the grandest
illuminations in Paris mean and vulgar by comparison. It is not in the
costliness of the display that its splendour lies; it is in what may
almost be termed the zeal with which Nature works with art towards the
same end. Without the rocks and precipices the spectacle would be
commonplace; but the site being what it is, the scene has a strange
and wonderful charm that may be called either fairylike or heavenly,
as the imagination may prefer. The artistic means employed are simple
enough--paper lanterns and little lamps of coloured glass; but what an
effect is produced when chains of fire have been stretched across the
gorge from the summits of the rocks on either side, when the long
succession of zigzags reaching up the cliff, and forming the Way of
the Cross, is also marked out with fire, when the ramparts on the
brink of the precipice are ablaze with coloured lamps, recalling some
old poetical picture of an enchanted castle, and a little to the
right, on the summit of the cliff where the Via Crucis ends at
Calvary, the great wooden cross which French pilgrims carried through
the streets of Jerusalem stands against the calm starlit sky like a
cross of blood-red flame!

A little below the summit of the cliff, from the large cavern which
has been fashioned to represent the Holy Sepulchre, there issues a
brilliant light, together with the sound of many voices singing the
'Tantum ergo.' A faint odour of incense wanders here and there among
the shrubs, and mingles with the fragrance of flowers upon the
terraces. Presently the clergy and the pilgrims come forth, and,
forming a long procession, descend the Way of the Cross; and as the
burning tapers that they carry shine and flash amongst the foliage,
these words, familiar to every pilgrim to Roc-Amadour, sung by
hundreds of voices, may be heard afar off in the dark desolate gorge:

'Reine puissante, Mere d'Amour,
Soi