aim at showing the orator that he should punish himself and
correct his own vices before he blames those of others. The wooden
crossbeam to which the bell is suspended resembles in form the Cross of
Christ, and the rope pulled by the ringer to set the bell going is
allegorical of the knowledge of the Scripture which depends on the Cross
itself.

According to Hugh of Saint Victor, the tongue of the bell is the
sacerdotal tongue, which, striking on both sides of the body, declares
the truth of both Testaments. Finally, to others the bell itself is the
mouth of the Liturgy, and the tongue its tongue.

"In fact, the bell is the Church's herald, its outer voice, as the
priest is its inward voice," Durtal concluded.

While meditating in this wise, he had reached the cathedral, and for the
hundredth time stood to admire those powerful abutments throwing out,
with the strong curve of a projectile, flying buttresses like spoked
wheels, and, as usual, he was amazed by the flight of the parabola, the
grace of the trajectory, the sober strength of those curved supports.
"Still," said he to himself, as he studied the parapet raised above
them, bordering the roof of the nave, "the architect who was content to
stamp out those trefoil arches, as if they were punched in that stone
parapet, was less happily inspired than certain other master-masons or
stone-workers who enclosed the little gutter-path they made round church
roofs with scriptural or symbolical images. Such an one was he who built
the cathedral at Troyes, where the top parapet is carved alternately
into fleur de lys and Saint Peter's keys; and he who at Caudebec
sculptured the edge into gothic letters of a delightfully decorative
character, spelling a hymn to the Virgin, thus crowning the church with
a garland of prayer, wreathing its head with a white chaplet of
aspiration."

Durtal left the north side of the cathedral, went past the royal door
and round the corner of the old tower. With one hand he held on his hat,
and with the other grasped the skirts of his coat, which flapped about
his legs. The storm blew permanently on this spot. There might be not a
breath of air anywhere else in the town, but here, at this corner,
winter and summer, there was always a blast that caught cloaks and
skirts and lashed the face with icy thongs.

"That perhaps is the reason why the statues of the neighbouring north
door, which are so incessantly scourged by the wind, stand in such