appeared as if it were designed to take with it all earthly things; and
I felt almost forced by it, and summoned from my seat, and could hardly
refrain from jumping over a parapet wall which stood before me. The
building of this hermitage, however, is very secure; nothing can shake
or remove it, but that which must shake or remove the whole mountain. At
this cell, small as it is, King Philip the Third dined on the eleventh
of July 1599;--a circumstance, you may be sure, the inhabitant will
never forget, or omit to mention. It commands at noon-day a fine
prospect eastward, and is approached by a good stage of steps. Not far
from it, on the road side, is a little chapel called St. Michael, a
chapel as ancient as the monastery itself; and a little below is the
grotto, in which the image of the Virgin, now fixed in the high altar of
the church, was found. The entrance of this grotto is converted into a
chapel, where mass is said every day by one of the monks. All the
hermitages, even the smallest, have their little chapel, the ornaments
for saying mass, their water cistern, and most of them a little garden.
The building consists of one or two little chambers, a little refectory,
and a kitchen; but many of them have every convenience within and
without that a single man can wish or desire, except he should wish for
or desire _such things_ as he was obliged to renounce when he took
possession of it.

From hence, by a road more wonderful than safe or pleasing, you are led
on a ridge of mountains to the lofty cell of _St. Onofre_. It stands in
a cleft in one of the pine heads, six and thirty feet (I was going to
say) above the earth; its appearance is indeed astonishing, for it seems
in a manner hanging in the air; the access to it is by a ladder of sixty
steps, extremely difficult to ascend, and even then you have a wooden
bridge to cross, fixed from rock to rock, under which is an aperture of
so terrifying an appearance, that I still think a person, not over