with gnarled and fantastic stocks, has so overspread the masonry in places that hardly a gray stone shows through the dense matting of sombre leaves and hoary, wrinkled stems.  Multitudes of bats cling to the ruinous vaulting where the light is very dim, and lurk in the hollows of the rock.  A stone thrown up will bring them fluttering down and whirling about the head of the intruder, noiselessly as if they were the ghosts that haunt the spot, but dare not reveal to the eye of man the human shape that they once wore.  This castle belonged, and still belongs, to the D’Hebrard family, which was connected by marriage with the Cardaillacs and most of the ancient aristocracy of the Quercy.

Leaving St. Sulpice, another hour’s walk down the valley brought me to Marcillac, which, after Figeac, was the most important place on the Cele in the Middle Ages.  It is now, however, a mere village.  According to local historians, it was here that Palladius, Bishop of Bourges, retired in the fifth century to escape from the persecution of the Arians.  Nothing, however, that has been written of its history, prior to the ninth or tenth century, can be accepted with any confidence.  What can be safely affirmed is, that here, between the rocky cliffs that border the Cele, arose one of the earliest of the Benedictine abbeys in France.  The ruined cloisters of the monastery have all the severe charm of the simple Romanesque style of the early period, but there is no means of knowing whether they date from the tenth, eleventh, or twelfth century.  There are several beautiful capitals elaborately embellished with intersecting line ornament still preserved, although no value whatever is placed upon them by the inhabitants.  The cloisters are used for stables, and other common farm purposes.

The abbey church must have fallen into complete ruin, when a portion of it was restored and rebuilt in the fifteenth century.  Then about half the nave—­the western end—­was cut off, and left open to the weather.  It is roofless, and the visitor walking, now in deep shadow, now in brilliant light, as the fragments of masonry may hide or reveal the sun, sees the blue sky through the arches and over the tops of the ivy-covered walls.  This part of the old church shows the transition between the Romanesque and the Gothic styles.

It would have been a slight upon Marcillac had I left the place without seeing the most famous of its caverns, which goes by the name of the Grotte de Robinet.  I might have looked for it in vain all day had I not taken a guide.

First, the causse had to be reached by ascending the cliffs on the right bank of the Cele.  Then I saw before me the stony undulating land, with the sad sentiment of which I had already grown so familiar.  An old woman, nearly doubled up with age and field labour, but who plied her distaff as she led her black goats to browse upon the waste, made me understand that the solitude was not altogether bereft of human