the fringe of the incoming tide; not until their knees went under water did they forego their venture.  A higher wave came in, deluging the ones farthest out; and then ensued a scampering toward the dike and a climbing up of the stone embankment.  The old route across the sands, that had been the only one known to kings and barons, was not good enough for a modern Norman peasant.  The religion of personal comfort has spread even as far as the fields.

Other aspects of the hill, on this day of the pilgrimage, made those older dead-and-gone bands of pilgrims astonishingly real.  On the tops of bastions, in the clefts on the rocks, beneath the glorious walls of La Merveille, or perilously lodged on the crumbling cornice of a tourelle, numerous rude altars had been hastily erected.  The crude blues and scarlets of banners were fluttering, like so many pennants, in the light breeze.  Beneath the improvised altar-roofs—­strips of gay cloth stretched across poles stuck into the ground—­were groups not often seen in these less fervent centuries.

High up, mounted on the natural pulpit, formed of a bit of rock, with the rude altar before him with its bits of scarlet cloth covered with cheap lace, stood or knelt the priest.  Against the wide blue of the open heaven his figure took on an imposing splendor of mien and an unmodern impressiveness of action.  Beneath him knelt, with bowed heads, the groups of the peasant pilgrims; the women, with murmuring lips and clasped hands, their strong, deeply-seamed faces outlined with the precision of a Francesco painting against the gray background of a giant mass of wall or the amazing breadth of a vast sea-view; children, squat and chubby, with bulging cheeks starting from the close-fitting French “bonnet”; and the peasant-farmers, mostly of the older varieties, whose stiffened or rheumatic knees and knotty hands made their kneeling real acts of devotional zeal.

There were a dozen such altars and groups scattered over the perpendicular slant of the hill.  The singing of the choir boys, rising like skylark notes into the clear space of heaven, would be floating from one rocky-nested chapel, while below, in the one beneath which we, for a moment, were resting, there would be the groaning murmur of the peasant groups in prayer.

Three times did the vision of St. Michael appear to Saint Aubert, in his dream, commanding the latter to erect a church on the heights of Mont St. Michel to his honor.  How many a time must the modern pilgrim traverse the stupendous mass that has grown out of that command before he is quite certain that the splendor of Mont St. Michel is real, and not part of a dream!