found them sweet--"Ah"--one of the branches had fallen--she
had full time to re-adjust the loosened support. And "Marianne, give
these ladies their hot water, and see to their bags"--even this order
was given with courtesy. It was only when the supple, agile figure had
left us to fly down the steep rock-cut steps; when it shot over the
top of the gateway and slid with the grace of a lizard into the street
far below us, that we were made sensible of there having been any
special need of madame's being in haste ...

The Mont proved by its appearance its history in adventure; it had the
grim, grave, battered look that comes only to features--whether of
rock or of more plastic human mold--that have been carved by the rough
handling of experience.

It is the common habit of hills and mountains, as we all know, to turn
disdainful as they grow skyward; they only too eagerly drop, one by
one, the things by which man has marked the earth for his own. To
stand on a mountain top and to go down to your grave are alike, at
least in this--that you have left everything, except yourself, behind
you. But it is both the charm and the triumph of Mont St. Michael,
that it carries so much of man's handiwork up into the blue fields of
the air; this achievement alone would mark it as unique among hills.
It appears as if for once man and nature had agreed to work in concert
to produce a masterpiece in stone. The hill and the architectural
beauties it carries aloft, are like a taunt flung out to sea and to
the upper heights of air; for centuries they appear to have been
crying aloud, "See what we can do, against your tempests and your
futile tides--when we try" ... Rustic France along this coast still
makes pilgrimages to the shrine of the Archangel St. Michael. No
marriage is rightly arranged which does not include a wedding-journey
across the "greve"; no nuptial breakfast is aureoled with the true
halo of romance which is eaten elsewhere than on these heights in
mid-air. The young come to drink deep of wonders; the old, to refresh
the depleted fountains of memory; and the tourist, behold he is a
plague of locusts let loose upon the defenseless hill!

It was impossible, after sojourning a certain time upon the hill, not
to concede that there were two equally strong centers of attraction
that drew the world hitherward. One remained, indeed, gravely
suspended between the doubt and the fear, as to which of these
potential units had the greate