While I was in St. Philibert, my wife was sketching and writing in the sunny street outside. I have purloined the following from her notebook. [Illustration: ·STREET IN TOURNUS·] "When I think of Tournus, there comes to my mind the picture of a dear little street bathed in warm afternoon sunlight. On my left, as I sit, pencil in hand, is the west front of the Cathedral, and in front of me, a row of little, low, whitewashed cottages line the street. Above the last cottage there rises a heavy gable, thick, and white, and solid, pierced only by one little grated window. This gable is a fragment of the old abbey, and the arched grating is the window of the refectory used by the monks. There are small shops and more cottages on my right. The street slopes downhill, and ends in a little, round, white tower, with a round, brown, pointed hat. It is the sort of tower that one longs to get round the other side of, or, best of all, into. A great, warm, purple shadow crosses the street in front of me, and creeps a little way up the white cottages opposite. It leaves a piece of wall in brilliant, dazzling sun, and then begins again in a jagged, purple lace fringe, under the heavy frieze of vine-leaves over the doors. "An old lady, in white cap and woolly shawl, walks out of a cottage, and into my sketch. The little boys round me, with best striped Sunday socks, and mouths full of sweets, suddenly become eager and interested, whereas before they were only curious. "Hey! La gran'mère!" they whisper excitedly; and a discussion ensues as to whose grandmother it is. There must be heaps of grandmothers in Tournus, and I have only shown her back view disappearing round the little white tower. And, because of the human interest with which my picture is now endowed, the crowd of little boys becomes quite twice as large." * * * * * Wandering to-day through the quiet, sleepy, but by no means poverty-stricken streets of Tournus, one can easily forget the condition of awful misery to which this part of Burgundy was reduced at the close of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh centuries, when the old church of St. Philibert was in course of construction. The horrors of that period--when the faithful, eagerly awaiting the second coming of Christ, had, as they thought, ocular demonstration that the end of all mankind was at hand--have been best depicted for us by that strange figure, the priest, Raoul Glaber.