uitgarde, wife of the great Emperor, who died at Tours in 800.
I do not pretend to understand in what relation these very mighty and
effectually detached masses of masonry stood to each other, but in their
grey elevation and loneliness they are striking and suggestive to-day;
holding their hoary heads far above the modern life of the town and
looking sad and conscious, as they had outlived all uses. I know not
what is supposed to have become of the bones

[Illustration: TOURS--THE TOWERS OF ST. MARTIN]

of the blessed saint during the various scenes of confusion in which
they may have got mislaid; but a mystic connection with his
wonder-working relics may be perceived in a strange little sanctuary on
the left of the street, which opens in front of the Tour
Charlemagne--whose immemorial base, by the way, inhabited like a cavern,
with a diminutive doorway where, as I passed, an old woman stood
cleaning a pot, and a little dark window decorated with homely flowers,
would be appreciated by a painter in search of "bits." The present
shrine of Saint Martin is enclosed (provisionally, I suppose) in a very
modern structure of timber, where in a dusky cellar, to which you
descend by a wooden staircase adorned with votive tablets and paper
roses, is placed a tabernacle surrounded by twinkling tapers and
prostrate worshippers. Even this crepuscular vault, however, fails, I
think, to attain solemnity; for the whole place is strangely vulgar and
garish. The Catholic Church, as churches go to-day, is certainly the
most spectacular; but it must feel that it has a great fund of
impressiveness to draw upon when it opens such sordid little shops of
sanctity as this. It is impossible not to be struck with the
grotesqueness of such an establishment as the last link in the chain of
a great ecclesiastical tradition.

In the same street, on the other side, a little below, is something
better worth your visit than the shrine of Saint Martin. Knock at a high
door in a white wall (there is a cross above it), and a fresh-faced
sister of the convent of the Petit Saint Martin will let you into the
charming little cloister, or rather fragment of cloister. Only one side
of this surpassing structure remains, but the whole place is effective.
In front of the beautiful arcade, which is terribly bruised and
obliterated, is one of those walks of interlaced _tilleuls_ which are so
frequent in Touraine, and into which the green light filters so softly
th