near the apse, amidst the yarrow and mulleins of forgotten grave mounds.
They were following the service by the open window. I lingered about the
cemetery reading the quaint inscriptions and noting the poor emblems upon
wooden crosses not yet decayed, picking here and there a wild flower, and
watching the butterflies and bees until the old priest, who was singing the
mass in a voice broken by time, having called upon his people to 'lift up
their hearts,' they answered: '_Habemus ad Dominum_.'

I had a simple lunch at a small inn in this village, where I was watched
with much curiosity by an old man in a blouse with a stiff shirt-collar
rising to his ears, and a nightcap with tassel upon his head. The widow who
kept the inn had a son who offered to walk with me as far as some chapel
in the gorge of the Chavannon. We were not long in reaching the gorge, the
view of which from the edge of the plateau was superbly savage. Descending
a very rugged path through the forest that covered the sides of the deep
fissure, save where the stark rock refused to be clothed, we came to a
small chapel, centuries old, under a natural wall of gneiss, but deep in
the shade of overhanging boughs. It was dedicated to St. John the Baptist,
and on St. John's Day mass was said in it, and the spot was the scene of a
pilgrimage. Outside was a half-decayed moss-green wooden platform on which
the priest stood while he preached to the assembled pilgrims. The young
man left me, and I went on alone into the more sombre depths of the gorge,
where I reached the single line of railway that runs here through some of
the wildest scenery in France. I kept on the edge of it, where walking,
although very rough, was easier than on the steep side of the split that
had here taken place in the earth's crust. Upon the narrow stony strip of
comparatively level ground the sun's rays fell with concentrated ardour,
and along it was a brilliant bloom of late summer flowers--of camomile, St.
John's wort, purple loosestrife, hemp-agrimony and lamium. At almost every
step there was a rustle of a lizard or a snake. The melancholy cry of the