it has filled one of the yards and has completed a thickness of five feet, he sells it to the farmers, who send their carts to carry it off.  He has divided this enclosure or repository into three or four compartments.  The compost therefore is prepared, and ready to be carried off in one yard, while the others are filling.  In this he has rendered a great benefit to the public, for the Auvergnats are incurable in their custom of emptying their pots de chambre out of the windows; so that the streets every morning are in a terrible state:  but thanks to the industry of C——­ his cars go round to collect the precious material, and all is cleared away by twelve o’clock.  He collects bones too, and offal to add to the compost.  He conducted me to see his premises; but the odour was too strong....

I returned to Lausanne by the same route, leaving Clermont on the 6th April, staying four days at Lyons and as many at Geneva.  Young Wardle accompanied me.  We met with no other adventure on the road than having a young Catholic priest, fresh from the seminary, for our travelling companion, from Thiers to Roanne.  This young man wished to convert Wardle and myself to Catholicism.

Among many arguments that he made use of was that most silly one, which has been so often sported by the Catholic theologians, viz.:  that it is much safer to be a Catholic than a Protestant, inasmuch as the Catholics do not allow that any person can be saved out of the pale of their church, whereas the Protestants do allow that a Catholic may be saved.  I answered him that this very argument made more against Catholicism than any other, and that this intolerant spirit would ever prevent me (even had such an idea entered into my head) of embracing such a religion.  I then told him that, once for all, I did not wish to enter into any theological disputes; that I had fully made up my mind on these subjects; and that I would rather take the opinion of a Voltaire or a Franklin on these matters than all the opinions of all the theologians and churchmen that ever sat in council from the Council of Nicsea to the present day.  This silenced him effectually.  Such is the absurd line of conduct pursued by the Catholic priests of the present day in France.  Instead of reforming the discipline and dogmas of their church and adapting it to the enlightened ideas of the present age, they are sedulously employd in preaching intolerant doctrines, and reviving absurd legends, and pretended miracles, which have been long ago consigned to contempt and oblivion by all rational Catholics; and by this they hope to re-establish the ecclesiastical power in its former glory and preponderance.  Vain hope!  By the American and French Revolutions a great light is gone up to the Gentiles.  Catholicism is on its last legs, and they might as soon attempt to replace our old friend and school acquaintance Jupiter on the throne of heaven, as to re-establish the Papal power in its pristine splendour; to borrow the language of the Pilgrim’s Progress, the Giant Pope will be soon as dead as the Giant Pagan.