, and subterranean excavations of a
most remarkable character, one of them extending for more than two
miles. Down to the time of Henry IV. Albert was known as Ancre. Concini,
the Florentine favourite of Mary de' Medici, bought the lordship of
Ancre with the title of marquis. With the help of his clever Florentine
wife, Leonora Galigai, he completely subjugated the queen and her weak
son, Louis XIII.; and, without so much as drawing his sword in battle,
made himself a marshal of France, How all this led him on to his ruin I
need not recite. He was stabbed to death in the precincts of the Louvre
by Vitry; his wife, arraigned as a sorceress, was strangled and burned;
and their unfortunate little son was degraded. The marquisate and
lordship of Ancre were bought, oddly enough, by another and very
different Florentine race, the Alberti, who had come into France and
established themselves in the Venaissin a hundred years before. So
intense was the general hatred of the Concinis, that, upon acquiring
Ancre, the Alberti unbaptized the place and gave it their own French
name of Albert, which is still most honourably borne by their
representatives, the ducal houses of Luynes and of Chaulnes. It is
common enough in France, as it is in England, to find the names of
families perpetuated in conjunction with those of places once their
property--Kingston-Lacy, Stanton-Harcourt, Bagot's Bromley, Melton
Mowbray are English cases in point. But this displacement of an old
territorial designation by a family name is unusual. Some thing like it
has taken place in our own times and in a remote south-western corner of
France, where the people of Arles-les-Bains changed the name of their
pleasant little town of orange groves and olives to Amelie, to
commemorate their respect and affection for the excellent queen of Louis
Philippe.

There are factories at Albert; and a modern church is building there,
not to the unmixed delight of architects and archaeologists. But my
concern now is with the work of the Marist Brothers who have made Albert
their headquarters.

This work is carried on with the direct and active co-operation of the
people. At one little hamlet, for example, called, I think, Brebieres,
nearly a hundred children now attend the Marist school, whose parents
pay for each child a subscription of three francs a month. There, not
long ago, it was found that in one poor family of peasants a family
council had been called to raise this m