white-veiled heads; then another of young boys, with faces as pale
as the nosegays adorning their brand-new black coats; next the
scarlet-robed choristers, singing, and behind them still others
swinging incense that thickened the dusk. Suddenly, like a vision, the
white veils passed out into the sunlight, and we saw that the faces
beneath the veils were young and comely. The faces were still
alternately lighted by the flare of the burning tapers and the glare of
the noon sun. The long procession ended at last in a straggling group
of old peasants with fine tremulous mouths, a-tremble with pride and
with feeling; for here they were walking in full sight of their town,
in their holiday coats, with their knees treacherously unsteady from
the thrill of the organ's thunder and the sweetness of the choir-boys'
singing.

Whether it was a pardon, or a _fete_, or a first communion, we never
knew. But the town of St. Lo is ever gloriously lighted, for us, with a
nimbus of young heads, such as encircled the earlier madonnas.

After such a goodly spectacle, the rest of the town was a tame morsel.
We took a parting sniff of the incense still left in the eastern end of
the church's nave; there was a bit of good glass in a window to reward
us. Outside the church, on the west from the Petite Place, was a wide
outlook over the lovely vale of the Vire, with St. Lo itself twisting
and turning in graceful postures down the hillside.

On the same prospect two kings have looked, and before the kings a
saint. St. Lo or St. Laudus himself, who gave his name to the town,
must, in the sixth century, have gazed on virgin forests stretching
away from the hill far as the eye could reach. Charlemagne, three
hundred years later, in his turn, found the site a goodly one, one to