daylight, to itself. Its stained glass, work of the same hands that
had wrought for the cathedral of Chartres, admitted only an almost
angry ray of purple or crimson, here or there, across the dark, roomy
spaces. The heart, the heart of youth at least, sank, as one
entered, stepping warily out of the sunshine over the sepulchral
stones which formed the entire pavement of the church, a great
blazonry of family history from age to age for indefatigable eyes.
An abundance of almost life-sized sculpture clung to the pillars,
lurked in the angles, seemed, with those symbolical gestures, and
mystic faces [6] ready to speak their parts, to be almost in motion
through the gloom. Many years after, Gaston de Latour, an enemy of
all Gothic darkness or heaviness, returning to his home full of a
later taste, changed all that. A thicket of airy spires rose above
the sanctuary; the blind triforium broke into one continuous window;
the heavy masses of stone were pared down with wonderful dexterity of
hand, till not a hand's-breadth remained uncovered by delicate
tracery, as from the fair white roof, touched sparingly with gold,
down to the subterranean chapel of Saint Taurin, where the peasants
of La Beauce came to pray for rain, not a space was left unsearched
by cheerful daylight, refined, but hardly dimmed at all, by painted
glass mimicking the clearness of the open sky. In the sombre old
church all was in stately order now: the dusky, jewelled reliquaries,
the ancient devotional ornaments from the manor--much-prized family
possessions, sufficient to furnish the whole array of a great
ecclesiastical function like this--the lights burning, flowers
everywhere, gathered amid the last handfuls of the harvest by the
peasant-women, who came to present their children for the happy
chance of an episcopal blessing.

And the almost exclusively aged people, in all their old personal