ribs and gullies of the mountain
were faintly designed in the moonshine; and high overhead, in some lone
house, there burned one lighted window, one square spark of red in the
huge field of sad nocturnal colouring.

At a certain point, as I went downward, turning many acute angles, the
moon disappeared behind the hill; and I pursued my way in great
darkness, until another turning shot me without preparation into St.
Germain de Calberte. The place was asleep and silent, and buried in
opaque night. Only from a single open door, some lamplight escaped upon
the road to show me that I was come among men's habitations. The two
last gossips of the evening, still talking by a garden wall, directed me
to the inn. The landlady was getting her chicks to bed; the fire was
already out, and had, not without grumbling, to be rekindled; half an
hour later, and I must have gone supperless to roost.

THE LAST DAY

When I awoke (Thursday, 2nd October), and, hearing a great flourishing
of cocks and chuckling of contented hens, betook me to the window of the
clean and comfortable room where I had slept the night, I looked forth
on a sunshiny morning in a deep vale of chestnut gardens. It was still
early, and the cockcrows, and the slanting lights, and the long shadows,
encouraged me to be out and look round me.

St. Germain de Calberte is a great parish nine leagues round about. At
the period of the wars, and immediately before the devastation, it was
inhabited by two hundred and seventy-five families, of which only nine
were Catholic; and it took the _cure_ seventeen September days to go
from house to house on horseback for a census. But the place itself,
although capital of a canton, is scarce larger than a hamlet. It lies
terraced across a steep slope in the midst of mighty chestnuts. The
Protestant chapel stands below upon a shoulder; in the midst of the town
is the quaint old Catholic church.

It was here that poor Du Chayla, the Christian martyr, kept his library
and held a court of missionaries; here he had built his tomb, thinking
to lie among a grateful population whom he had redeemed from error; and
hither on the morrow of his death they brought the body, pierced with
two-and-fifty wounds, to be interred. Clad in his priestly robes, he was
laid out in state in the church. The _cure_, taking his text from Second
Samuel, twentieth chapter and twelfth verse, "And Amasa wallowed in his
blood in the highway," preached a r