a paler scheme, above the dark trunks, the yellowing
upper branches, tanned and half-obliterated by the sharp though sidelong
rays of an invisible sun. All these things and, still more than these,
the treasures which had come to the church from personages who to me
were almost legendary figures (such as the golden cross wrought, it was
said, by Saint Eloi and presented by Dagobert, and the tomb of the sons
of Louis the Germanic in porphyry and enamelled copper), because of
which I used to go forward into the church when we were making our way
to our chairs as into a fairy-haunted valley, where the rustic sees with
amazement on a rock, a tree, a marsh, the tangible proofs of the little
people's supernatural passage--all these things made of the church for
me something entirely different from the rest of the town; a building
which occupied, so to speak, four dimensions of space--the name of the
fourth being Time--which had sailed the centuries with that old nave,
where bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across
and hold down and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each
successive epoch from which the whole building had emerged triumphant,
hiding the rugged barbarities of the eleventh century in the thickness
of its walls, through which nothing could be seen of the heavy arches,
long stopped and blinded with coarse blocks of ashlar, except where,
near the porch, a deep groove was furrowed into one wall by the
tower-stair; and even there the barbarity was veiled by the graceful
gothic arcade which pressed coquettishly upon it, like a row of grown-up
sisters who, to hide him from the eyes of strangers, arrange themselves
smilingly in front of a countrified, unmannerly and ill-dressed younger
brother; rearing into the sky above the Square a tower which had looked
down upon Saint Louis, and seemed to behold him still; and thrusting
down with its crypt into the blackness of a Merovingian night, through
which, guiding us with groping finger-tips beneath the shadowy vault,
ribbed strongly as an immense bat's wing of stone, Theodore or his
sister would light up for us with a candle the tomb of Sigebert's little
daughter, in which a deep hole, like the bed of a fossil, had been
bored, or so it was said, "by a crystal lamp which, on the night when
the Frankish princess was murdered, had left, of its own accord, the
golden chains by which it was suspended where the apse is to-day and
with neither the crystal