ast the mountains of the Nivernois.
Its ancient and picturesque capital, Vezelay, crowns a hill 2,000 feet
in height, and commands a panoramic view of the country for thirty miles
round. It has all the characteristics of a town of the feudal times,
with high embattled and loopholed walls, numerous towers, and deep and
strong gateways, under which are still to be seen the grooves of the
portcullis, the warder's guard-room, and the hooks that supported the
heavy drawbridge.

The capital of Le Morvan partially owed its rise to a celebrated
nunnery, founded by Gerard de Roussillon, a great hero of romance and
chivalry, who lived, loved, and fought under Pepin, the father of the
grand Charlemagne. This nunnery, which was sacked and burnt to the
ground by the Saracens, those terrible warriors of the East, was
restored in the ninth century, and fortified; and as the sainted inmates
were believed to have amongst their relics a tress of the golden hair of
the beautiful and repentant Magdalen, troops of the faithful--and people
were ready to believe a great deal in those days--flocked to Vezelay,
when it soon became a large and flourishing town.

In the tenth century, when the people, in their endeavour to shake off
a few links of their fetters, refused to bend their bodies in the dust
before their lords and their minds before their priests--when the seeds
of liberty, till then lying in unprofitable ground, though watered for
centuries by the tears of tyranny and oppression, first germinated and
rose above the earth, who gave the signal of resistance in France?--the
inhabitants of Vezelay. Yes; it is to her citizens that the honour
belongs of having first refused to submit to the power, the domineering
power, of political and ecclesiastical rule; it was her brave
inhabitants who, assembling in secret, thought not of the peril, but,
having promised help and protection one to the other, flew to arms. A
short and desperate struggle ensued, but the victory remained in the
hands of the abbot of Vezelay. Hundreds of brave men were put, without
mercy, to the sword, and many, with less mercy, burnt alive or died by
the torture in the dark dungeons of the abbatical palace. Vezelay still
preserves in its archives the names of twelve of these martyrs.

Again in the twelfth century, when the cry to the rescue of the Holy
Sepulchre shook all Europe, and every nation poured forth her tens of
thousands to drive the infidel from that land in w