past
century--in order to fit it to the needs of modern traffic--that its
picturesqueness has been destroyed. The chapel of St. Nicholas upon one
of its piers, and the tower at its centre, were razed about the end of
the last century; a little later the fortified approaches were removed;
in the year 1854, to provide for the increasing river navigation, the
first two arches from the right bank were replaced by a single iron arch
of two hundred feet span over the main channel; and in the year 1860 the
entire superstructure on the north side, with a part of the
superstructure on the south side, was torn down--and in place of the old
narrow roadway, with turn-outs on each pier, there was built a roadway
uniformly twenty-two feet wide. In a sentimental way, of course, these
radical changes are to be regretted; but I am sure that the good
Brothers, could they have been consulted in the premises, would have
been the first to sanction them. For they were not sentimentalists, the
Brothers; they were practical to the last degree. What they wanted was
that their bridge, living up to their own concept of duty, should do the
greatest amount of good to the greatest number of men.

Almost as we came out from beneath that monument to practical
Christianity, we saw over on the left bank two monuments to the
theoretical Christianity of three hundred years ago: the grisly ruins of
Mornas and Montdragon--each on a hill dark green with a thick growth of
_chene vert_, and each having about it (not wholly because of its dark
setting, I fancied) a darkly sinister air. In truth, the story of Mornas
is sombre enough to blacken not merely a brace of hill-tops but a whole
neighbourhood. In the early summer of the year 1565, a day or two before
the Fete-Dieu, the Papists surprised and seized the town and castle and
put the entire Huguenot garrison to the sword. Then, as now, it was the
custom in honour of the Fete-Dieu to adorn the house-fronts with
garlands and draperies; and by way of variant upon this pretty custom
"certain of the conquerors, more fanatical than the rest, flayed the
dead Huguenots and draped their houses bravely with Protestant skins."
Thereupon the Baron des Adrets, the Huguenot commander in that region,
sent one of his lieutenants, Dupuy-Montbrun, to avenge that deviltry. At
the end of a three-days' siege Mornas was conquered again, and then came
the vengeance: "for which the castle of Mornas, whereof the battlements
overhung