tered wood, one can still read a baby's
age, an old man's record, and the letters R. I. P.

In this strange, melancholy destiny of Notre-Dame-du-Bourg there seems
to be a peculiar fitness. The mutability of time, forgetfulness, and at
length neglect, which death suggests, are brought to mind by this old
church. Once the Cathedral of Digne, but no longer Cathedral, it stands
almost alone in spite of its honours and its venerable age. After the
desecration by the Huguenots, its episcopal birthright was given to a
younger and a larger church; the city has moved away and clusters about
its new Cathedral, Saint-Jerome; and Notre-Dame-du-Bourg is no longer on
a busy street, but near the dusty high-road, amid the quiet of the
country and the hills.

Parts of its crypt and tower may antedate 900, but the church itself was
re-built in the XII and XIII centuries. The course of time has brought
none of the incongruities which have ruined many churches by the
so-called restorations of the last three hundred years, and although its
simple Romanesque is sadly unrepaired, it is a delight to come into the
solitude and find an unspoiled example of this stanch old style.

[Illustration: THE INTERIOR OF NOTRE-DAME-DU-BOURG.--DIGNE.]

The Romanesque shows forth its great solidity in the exterior of its
churches, and nowhere more than in Digne's deserted Cathedral. Flat
buttresses line the walls, the transepts are square and plain, and on
either side the facade wall is upheld by a formidable support. This
severity of line is not greatly modified by the deep recesses of a few
windows; nor is the tower--which lost its spire three hundred years
ago--of less sober construction, less solidly built. Below the
overhanging eaves of a miserable roof and the curious line of the nave
vault which projects through the wall, is a round window with a frame of
massive rolls and hollows; and below this again, under a narrow sloping
covering, is the deep arch of the Cathedral's porch. This, in its prime,
must have been the church's ornamental glory. Beneath the outer arch,
which is continued to the buttresses by half-arches, are the great
roll-mouldings that twist backward to a plain tympanum. Capitals still
support these massive curves of stone, but the niches in which the
columns formerly stood are empty, and grinning lions, lying on the
ground, no longer support the larger columns of the plain arch. All
stands in solemn decay.

The traveller entered