took ten days to
make the repairs necessary, they used the interval of waiting to go by
train to Lourdes. It was the particular time when pilgrims go to seek
the healing waters of the miraculous fountain, and they saw many sad
and depressing sights--for the lame, the halt, the blind, people
afflicted with every sort of disease, and some even in the last
agonies, crowded the paths in a pitiful procession. Mrs. Stevenson
afterwards said that when she saw the blind come away from the sacred
fount with apparently seeing eyes, and the lame throw away their
crutches and walk, she was, as King Agrippa said unto Paul, "almost
persuaded" to believe.

Gladly putting this picture behind them, they went on to
Bagneres-de-Bigorre, a little village nestling at the base of the
Pyrenees. The weather there was perfect, and the whole atmosphere of
the place so sweetly simple and unsophisticated that Mrs. Stevenson
loved it best of all. After six pleasant days spent there, the motor
now mended, they returned by train to Pau and resumed their trip--due
east to Carcassonne, that lovely, lovely city, with its mediaeval
ramparts and towers, and then on to Cette on the Mediterranean, where
they landed in a storm.

And so north, almost paralleling their first trip, they ran through
Mende, Bourges, and Montargis, and one rainy afternoon passed within
sight of the village of Grez, where so many years before Fanny
Osbourne first met Louis Stevenson, but the memories that it brought
were too poignant, and she was only able to give one look as they sped
swiftly by.

Arriving in Paris on October 3, after this leisurely journey through
beautiful France, they remained but a few days there and then went on
to London, where they met the Favershams and sailed in company with
them for America on the _Vaterland_. With but a brief stop in New York
they hastened on to San Francisco to carry out a certain plan that had
been formulated while they were in France. Oddly enough, it was on the
other side of the world that Mrs. Stevenson first heard of beautiful
Stonehedge, the place at Santa Barbara which became the home of her
last days. At Monte Carlo she met Mrs. Clarence Postley, of
California, who dilated on the charms of the Santa Barbara place--its
fine old trees, its spring water, its romantic story of being haunted
by the ghost of a beautiful countess--until finally Mrs. Stevenson
said that if it was as charming as that she would buy it. After her
ret