of La Merveille, or perilously lodged on the crumbling cornice of a
tourelle, numerous rude altars had been hastily erected. The crude
blues and scarlets of banners were fluttering, like so many pennants,
in the light breeze. Beneath the improvised altar-roofs--strips of gay
cloth stretched across poles stuck into the ground--were groups not
often seen in these less fervent centuries.

High up, mounted on the natural pulpit, formed of a bit of rock, with
the rude altar before him with its bits of scarlet cloth covered with
cheap lace, stood or knelt the priest. Against the wide blue of the
open heaven his figure took on an imposing splendor of mien and an
unmodern impressiveness of action. Beneath him knelt, with bowed
heads, the groups of the peasant pilgrims; the women, with murmuring
lips and clasped hands, their strong, deeply-seamed faces outlined
with the precision of a Francesco painting against the gray background
of a giant mass of wall or the amazing breadth of a vast sea-view;
children, squat and chubby, with bulging cheeks starting from the
close-fitting French "bonnet"; and the peasant-farmers, mostly of the
older varieties, whose stiffened or rheumatic knees and knotty hands
made their kneeling real acts of devotional zeal.

There were a dozen such altars and groups scattered over the
perpendicular slant of the hill. The singing of the choir boys, rising
like skylark notes into the clear space of heaven, would be floating
from one rocky-nested chapel, while below, in the one beneath which
we, for a moment, were resting, there would be the groaning murmur of
the peasant groups in prayer.

Three times did the vision of St. Michael appear to Saint Aubert, in
his dream, commanding the latter to erect a church on the heights of