dry and
dust-covered; while about it trees and plants and weeds grow as they
may, and bits of the Cloister columns have fallen off, and niches are
without their guarding Saints.

[Illustration: "THE QUAINT AND PRETTY FOUNTAIN."--BEZIERS.]

By contrast, the Cathedral itself seems full of life. Its interior is an
aisle-less Gothic room, whose fine height and emptiness of column or
detail give it an appearance of vast and well-conceived proportions.
Except the really beautiful windows of the choir, which are a study in
themselves, there is very little in this interior to hold the mind; one
is lost in a pleasant sense of general symmetry. As the traveller was
sitting in the nave, a few priests filed into the choir, and began, in
quavering voices, to intone their prayers, and in the peacefulness of
the church, in the trembling monotony of the weak, old voices, his
thoughts wandered to the stirring history which had been lived about the
Cathedral, and within its very walls. For Beziers was and had always
been a hot-bed of heretics. Here in the IV century, long before the
building of the Cathedral, the Emperor Constantius II forced the
unwilling Catholic Bishops of Gaul to join their heretical Aryan
brethren in Council; here the equally heretical Visigoths gave new
strength to the dissenters; and here, again, after centuries of
orthodoxy which Clovis had imposed, a new centre of religious storm was
formed. It was about this period, the XII and XIV centuries, that the
Cathedral was built; and it is perhaps because of the strength of those
French protestants against the Church of Rome, the Albigenses, that its
essentially Gothic style was so confused by military additions. At the
beginning of the troublous times of which these towers are reminders,
Raymond-Roger of Trencavel, the gallant and romantic Lord of
Carcassonne, was also Viscount of Beziers; and contrary to the fanatical
enthusiasm of his day, was much disposed toward religious toleration;
therefore in the early wars of Catholics and Protestants the city of
Beziers became the refuge not only for the terrified Faithful of the
surrounding country, but for many hunted Protestants. In the XIII
century, the zeal of the Catholic party, reinforced by the political
interests of its members, grew most hot and dangerous. Saint Dominic had
come into the South; and in his fearful, fiery sermons, he not only
prophesied that the Albigenses would swell the number of the damned at
t