plain
of Alsace and the distant Vosges. The cliff of limestone that bounded
that height fell sheer upon the tree-tops; its sublimity arrested me,
and compelled me to record it.

'Surely,' I said, 'if Switzerland has any gates on the north they are
these.' Then, having drawn the wonderful outline of what I had seen, I
went up, panting, to the summit, and, resting there, discovered
beneath me the curious swirl of the Doubs, where it ran in a dark gulf
thousands of feet below. The shape of this extraordinary turn I will
describe in a moment. Let me say, meanwhile, that there was no
precipice or rock between me and the river, only a down, down, down
through other trees and pastures, not too steep for a man to walk, but
steeper than our steep downs and fells in England, where a man
hesitates and picks his way. It was so much of a descent, and so long,
that one looked above the tree-tops. It was a place where no one would
care to ride.

I found a kind of path, sideways on the face of the mountain, and
followed it till I came to a platform with a hut perched thereon, and
men building. Here a good woman told me just how to go. I was not to
attempt the road to Brune-Farine--that is, 'Whole-Meal Farm'--as I had
first intended, foolishly trusting a map, but to take a gully she
would show me, and follow it till I reached the river. She came out,
and led me steeply across a hanging pasture; all the while she had
knitting in her hands, and I noticed that on the levels she went on
with her knitting. Then, when we got to the gully, she said I had but
to follow it. I thanked her, and she climbed up to her home.

This gully was the precipitous bed of a stream; I clanked down
it--thousands of feet--warily; I reached the valley, and at last, very
gladly, came to a drain, and thus knew that I approached a town or
village. It was St Ursanne.

The very first thing I noticed in St Ursanne was the extraordinary
shape of the lower windows of the church. They lighted a crypt and ran
along the ground, which in itself was sufficiently remarkable, but
much more remarkable was their shape, which seemed to me to approach
that of a horseshoe; I never saw such a thing before. It looked as
though the weight of the church above had bulged these little windows
out, and that is the way I explain it. Some people would say it was a
man coming home from the Crusades that had made them this eastern way,
others that it was a symbol of something or other.