We went on into a sort of _annexe_ of the church, into which they used to shoot people through _oubliettes_ when they became superfluous, and thence we scrambled out into the street again, and across to the grotto of St. Emilion. Apparently the saint had not been able to find anything above ground that combined privacy with excruciating discomfort, and accordingly scratched out this rabbit hole a dozen feet below the rest of the community, and lived there in damp and darkness for twenty or thirty years. His furniture was limited. The light of a match showed a bed cut in the wall, with a bolster of the same sympathetic description, a stone block for a table, another for a chair, and a holy well in an alcove. The old woman who had charge of the grotto struck another match, and held it low in the alcove of the sacred well for us to see the dark gleam of the water. It was more like a shallow pool than a well, and the water lay still and perfectly transparent upon its yellow bed. Its ancient nymph scooped up a tumblerful with the assurance that it was the best in the world, and when we had satisfactorily tasted it, she lowered her match and said archly, ‘_Et les épingles. Regardez les épingles, mesdemoiselles._’ We regarded as desired, and saw lying at the bottom of the pool a small collection of pins, some old and rusty enough to have fastened up St. Emilion’s gown on wet days, others new and glittering. These, it was explained by the old lady with many knowing side-glances at our companions, were a means of fortune-telling peculiar to the sacred well. Gentlemen and ladies who visited it were accustomed to drop two pins into it, and if these fell so as to form a cross, then the thrower would be married before the year was out; this was asseverated with chapter and verse, and the testimony of brides and bridegrooms who had returned there on their honeymoons. I searched silently and secretly in my inner economy for a [Illustration: ‘ET LES ÉPINGLES, MESDEMOISELLES.’] pin; so, I perceived, did my cousin, but apparently without better success than I. The chief props of a declining costume could not be sacrificed to superstition, and our fortunes remain undivined to this day.