I cannot let this story end without mentioning what the chance saying was which caused it to be told at the farmhouse the other night.  Our friend the young sailor, among his other quaint objections to sleeping on shore, declared that he particularly hated four-post beds, because he never slept in one without doubting whether the top might not come down in the night and suffocate him.  I thought this chance reference to the distinguishing feature of William’s narrative curious enough, and my husband agreed with me.  But he says it is scarcely worth while to mention such a trifle in anything so important as a book.  I cannot venture, after this, to do more than slip these lines in modestly at the end of the story.  If the printer should notice my few last words, perhaps he may not mind the trouble of putting them into some out-of-the-way corner, in very small type.

L. K.

MICHEL LORIO’S CROSS, By Hesba Stretton

In the southwest point of Normandy, separated from Brittany only by a narrow and straight river, like the formal canals of Holland, stands the curious granite rock which is called Mont St. Michel.  It is an isolated peak, rising abruptly out of a vast plain of sand to the height of nearly four hundred feet, and so precipitous toward the west that scarcely a root of grass finds soil enough in its weather-beaten clefts.  At the very summit is built that wonderful church, the rich architecture and flying buttresses of which strike the eye leagues and leagues away, either on the sea or the mainland.  Below the church, and supporting it by a solid masonry, is a vast pile formerly a fortress, castle, and prison; with caverns and dungeons hewn out of the living rock, and vaulted halls and solemn crypts; all desolate and solitary now, except when a party of pilgrims or tourists pass through them, ushered by a guide.  Still lower down the rock, along its eastern and southern face, there winds a dark and narrow street, with odd, antique houses on either side.  The only conveyance that can pass along it is the water-cart which supplies the town with fresh water from the mainland.  The whole place is guarded by a strong and high rampart, with bastions and battlemented walls; and the only entrance is through three gateways, one immediately behind the other, with a small court between.  The second of these strong gateways is protected by two old cannon, taken from the English in 1423, and still pointed out to visitors with inextinguishable pride by the natives of Mont.  St. Michel.

A great plain of sand stretches around the Mont for miles every way—­of sand or sea, for the water covers it at flood-tides, beating up against the foot of the granite rocks and the granite walls of the ramparts.  But at neap tides and eaux mortes, as the French say, there is nothing but a desert of brown, bare sand, with ripple-marks lying across it, and with shallow, ankle-deep pools of salt water here and there.  Afar off on the western sky-line a silver fringe of foam, glistening in the sunshine, marks the distant boundary to which the sea has retreated.  On every other side of the horizon rises a belt of low cliffs, bending into a semicircle, with sweeping outlines of curves miles in length, drawn distinctly against the clear sky.