The streets had the noonday heat and silence about them when we emerged from beneath the chestnut tree, and went downhill to where a lofty yellow cliff towered sheer in the hollow of the town, carrying on its crest the crocketed spire that we had seen lifting its long throat above its retainers like a serene highness, as we drove through the vineyards to St. Emilion. Low down on the cliff, below the reach of the swinging arms of a huge old fig tree that had rooted itself on the verge of the yellow rock, were carvings like the façade of a church, and finally a door disclosed itself, through which we plunged after our guides, much as we had plunged into the private cellar of the Rothschilds. We were in the famous monolith church, hewn and dug in the living cliff by monks, headed by the industrious St. Emilion, in the eighth century, and going down a few steps to the level of the floor, we looked about us in the extremely moderate light that came through sloping shafts in the thickness of the cliffs sixty feet above. The fig tree roots had burrowed through the cliff, and hung in loops and knots from the roof, intersecting the cold and dusty streaks of light, and the flicker of a sun-lit green spray at the mouth of one of the shafts gave the solitary touch of colour to the sombre vault. It was a bare, immense place, with two rows of square pillars of solid rock supporting the arched roof, black with age, empty of everything save a stone altar or two, and a few tombs, dead silent, and abounding in dark hiding-places for rats and bats. ‘All this makes you experience I know not what sentiment of religious terror,’ exclaims the guide-book at this juncture, in discreet rhapsody, having cantered through a page of architectural French, that had almost resulted in a case of ‘Bellows to mend’ for the owner of that admirable dictionary. Our sentiments were far from religious after a tour of that church, during which we had seen some hundreds of names, addresses, ages, birthdays, engagements, and other data inscribed in the soft stone by tourists. Only those who have seen the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey gashed with vile initials, could believe the ravages of vulgarity at St. Emilion. The pillars and tombs were fully garnished with these hall marks of the barbarian. That was only to be expected, as even the bones in the tombs had been carried away bit by bit as agreeable souvenirs, but one would have imagined that the altar might have been spared. It was here, however, and on the old bas-relief above the altar, that a gentleman called Merritt had achieved his deadliest triumphs; we tracked him subsequently through the grotto of St. Emilion and the monastery cloisters, but this was his highest effort, and probably the one that he recounts with most pride to his envious acquaintances. May the milkman and butcher’s boy scribble his name upon the imitation granite of his suburban door-posts, and may it be wiped out from the will of his father-in-law!