riers, the Porters and
Rag-pickers, each gave one.

Pondering on these things, Durtal wandered round the ambulatory and
paused in front of a small stone Virgin ensconced at the foot of the
stairs leading up to the chapel of Saint Piat, constructed in the
fourteenth century as a sort of outbuilding behind the apse. This
Virgin, dating from the same period, had shrunk into the shade, effacing
Herself, deferentially leaving the more important places to the senior
Madonnas.

She carried an Infant playing with a bird, in allusion, no doubt, to the
passage in the apocryphal Gospels of the Infancy, and of Thomas the
Israelite, which shows us the Child Jesus amusing Himself by modelling
birds out of clay, and giving them life by breathing upon them.

Then Durtal continued his walk through the chapels; stopping only to
look at one which contained relics of opposite utility and double
purpose: the shrines of Saint Piat and Saint Taurinus. The bones of the
former saint were displayed to secure dry weather in times of rain, and
those of the second to invoke rain in times of drought. But what was
far less comforting and more irritating even than this array of
side-chapels, with their wretched adornment--with names that had been
changed since their first dedication so that the tutelary protection
earned by centuries of service had ceased to exist--was the choir,
battered, dirty, degraded as if on purpose.

In 1763 the old Chapter had thought fit to deface the Gothic columns,
and to have them colour-washed by a Milanese lime-washer, of a yellowish
pink speckled with grey; then they had abandoned to the town-museum some
magnificent pieces of Flemish tapestry that screened the inner circuit
of the choir aisles, and had put in their place bas-reliefs in marble
executed by the dreadful bungler who had crushed the altar under the
gigantic group of the Virgin. And mischance had helped. In 1789 the
Sansculottes were intending to destroy this mountainous Assumption, and
some ill-starred idiot saved it by placing a cap of liberty on the
Virgin's head!

To think that some beautiful windows were knocked out in order to get a
better light for this mass of lard! If only there were the slightest
hope of ever getting rid of it; but alas! all such hopes are vain. Some
years ago, when Monseigneur Regnault was Bishop, the idea was indeed
suggested--not of making away with this petrified lump of tallow, but at
least of getting rid of the bas-relie