was speedily diverted by the sight awaiting him
at the conclusion of the mass. Hardly had the spectators returned to the
rector's windows when, the doors of the church swinging open, a
procession headed by the rector himself descended the steps and began to
make the circuit of the court. Odo's eyes swam with the splendour of
this burst of banners, images and jewelled reliquaries, surmounting the
long train of tonsured heads and bathed in a light almost blinding after
the mild penumbra of the church. As the monks advanced, the pilgrims,
pouring after them, filled the court with a dark undulating mass through
which the procession wound like a ray of sunlight down the brown bosom
of a torrent. Branches of oleander swung in the air, devout cries hailed
the approach of the Black Madonna's canopy, and hoarse voices swelled to
a roar the measured litanies of the friars.

The ceremonies over, Odo, with the canonesses, set out to visit the
chapels studding the beech-knoll above the monastic buildings. Passing
out of Juvara's great portico they stood a moment above the grassy
common, which presented a scene in curious contrast to that they had
just quitted. Here refreshment-booths had been set up, musicians were
fiddling, jugglers unrolling their carpets, dentists shouting out the
merits of their panaceas, and light women drinking with the liveried
servants of the nobility. The very cripples who had groaned the loudest
in church now rollicked with the mountebanks and dancers; and no trace
remained of the celebration just concluded but the medals and relics
strung about the necks of those engaged in these gross diversions.

It was strange to pass from this scene to the solitude of the grove,
where, in a twilight rustling with streams, the chapels lifted their
white porches. Peering through the grated door of each little edifice,
Odo beheld within a group of terra-cotta figures representing some scene
of the Passion--here a Last Supper, with a tigerish Judas and a Saint
John resting his yellow curls on his Master's bosom, there an Entombment
or a group of stricken Maries. These figures, though rudely modelled and
daubed with bright colours, yet, by a vivacity of attitude and gesture
which the mystery of their setting enhanced, conveyed a thrilling
impression of the sacred scenes set forth; and Odo was yet at an age
when the distinction between flesh-and-blood and its plastic
counterfeits is not clearly defined, or when at least the