match for mine, and so I come down from my ledge and make my way back
to my cottage before the pink blush of evening has faded from the
rocks.

When the angelus has sounded from the ancient sanctuary, and all the
forms of the valley are dim in the dusk, the silence is broken again
by a very quiet little bell, which might be called the fairies'
angelus if it did not keep ringing all through the spring and summer
nights. It is like a treble note of the piano softly touched. It
steals up from amongst the flags, hyacinths, and box-bushes of the
neglected little garden which I call mine, terraced upon the side of
the gorge just beneath the balcony. Now, from all the terraced gardens
planted with fruit-trees, comes the same sound of low, clear notes,
some a little higher than others, but all in the treble, feebly struck
by unseen musicians. How sweetly this tinkling rises from the earth,
that trembles with the bursting of seeds and the shooting of stems in
the first warm nights of spring! And to think that the musicians
should be toads--yes, toads--the most despised and the most unjustly
treated of creatures!

This cottage is at Roc-Amadour, and before writing about the place I
cannot do better than go down to the level of the stream, and look up
at the amazing cluster of buildings clinging to the rocks on one side
of the gorge, while the old walls are whitened by the pale brilliancy
of the moon. Above the roofs of all the houses is a mass of masonry,
vast and heavy, pierced by narrow Romanesque windows--a building
uncouth and monstrous, like the surrounding crags. It stands upon a
ledge of the cliff, partly in the hollow of the rock, which, indeed,
forms its innermost wall. Higher still a great cross shows against the
sky, and near to it, upon the edge of the precipice, are the ramparts