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ttes. No? Then signor would commence with soup? Finally _potage au riz_ was selected out of the embarrassment of riches poured at our feet by the enthusiastic G. There being yet an hour to dinner, we ascended the few steps that led to the summit of the hill on which the chapel is perched, a marvel to all new-comers by the highway of the Lake. The door was open, and we walked in. There was no light burning on the altar, nor any water in the stone basin by the door. But there was all the apparatus of worship--the gaudy toyshop above the grand altar, the tiny side chapels, with their pictures of the dying Saviour, and the confessional box, now thick with dust, and echoless of sob of penitent or counsel of confessor. It was evidently a poorly endowed chapel, the tinsel adornments being of the cheapest and the candles of the thinnest. But in some past generation a good Catholic had bestowed upon it an altarcloth of richest silk, daintily embroidered. The colours had faded out of the flowers, and the golden hue of the cloth had been grievously dimmed. Still it remained the one rich genuine piece of workmanship in a chapel disfigured by an overbearing hankering after paper flowers and tinsel. Early the next morning, whilst reposing under the magnificent counterpane on the bed of chopped straw, I was awakened by hearing the chapel bell ring for mass. I thought it must be the ghost of some disembodied priest, who had come up through the darkness of the night and the scarcely more luminous mist of the morning to say a mass for his own disturbed soul. But, as I presently learned, they were human hands that pulled the bell-rope, and a living priest said mass all by himself in this lonely chapel whilst dawn was breaking over a sleeping world. I saw him some hours later sitting on the kitchen dresser, in the sanctum where G. worked the mysteries of his art. He was resting his elbows on his knees as he leaned forward, and had in his mouth a large pipe, from which he vigorously puffed. I found him a very cheerful old gentleman, by no means unduly oppressed with the solemnity of this early mass in the lonely chapel. He lived down at Barbeng, at the back of the hill, and had come up this morning purely as a matter of business, and in partial fulfilment of a contract entered into with one of his parishioners, whose husband had been lost at sea whilst yet they were only twelve months married. The widow had scraped together sufficie
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