with the
lightness of heart once proverbially characteristic of the French
peasant. Still, he appears to a stranger cheerful, ready to chat, and at
least as inquisitive as to the stranger's history and objects as
Americans are commonly believed to be. It would be a happy thing if the
Irish peasant's lightness of heart, pleasant as it often is, could be
interfered with in the same way. There is a certain gayety which springs
from mere recklessness, and is sister to despair.

They are hard economical problems that we have to solve in this Old
World, and terribly complicated by social and political entanglements;
and there is no boundless West, with bread for all who want it, to
assist us in the solution.

From Avranches you visit Mont St. Michel,--not without difficulty, for
you have to drive along over sands which are never dry, and over which
the tide--its advance can be seen even from the distant height of
Avranches--rushes in with the speed of a race-horse. But you are well
repaid. Mont St. Michel is one of the most astonishing and beautiful
monuments of the Catholic and feudal age. Its fortifications, and the
halls, church, and cloisters of the chivalrous and monastic fraternities
of which it was the seat, rise like an efflorescence from the solitary
cone of granite, surrounded at low tide by the vast flat of sand, at
high tide by the sea. Gothic architecture, to which we are apt to attach
the notion of a sort of infantine unconsciousness, here seems
consciously to revel and disport itself in its power, and to exult in
investing the sea-girt rock with the playful elegance of a Cellini vase.
It is a real _jeu d'esprit_ of mediaeval art. The cloisters are a model
of airy grace, enhanced by contrast with the massiveness of the fortress
and the wildness of the scene. A strange life the monks must have led in
their narrow boundaries. But they had the visits of the knights to
relieve their dulness; and probably they were rude natures, not liable
to the unhappiness which such seclusion would produce in men of
cultivated sensibilities and active minds. Both monks and knights are
gone long ago. But there are still six priests on the rock. I asked what
they did. "Ils prient le bon Dieu."

In feudal times this sea-girt fortress was almost impregnable. Two
ancient cannon lying at its gate show that the conqueror of Agincourt
thundered against it in vain. Its weak point was want of water: it had
none but the rain-water collec