It will seem astonishing to the author of _Village Communities in Western Europe_ to hear of so large a sum as £40 being subscribed by the congregation of this remote village, and it would seem still more astonishing to him could he see the very large chapel erected over the spring of St. Loup. I do not say that he would understand the phenomenon, but I do say that he would become a more perturbed and therefore a wiser man did he know the following four facts:--(1) That the freehold value of the village and its communal land, amounting to the sum of a poor £20,000, was not in the possession of a landlord, but in that of these wretched peasants. (2) That the one rich man of the neighbourhood, a retired glove-maker, being also a fanatic, presented his subscriptions in such a manner that they were never heard of. He had, moreover, an abhorrence for the regulation of charity. (3) That the master mason in the neighbouring town had in his youth been guilty of several mortal sins, and was so weak as to imagine that a special tender would in such a case make a kind of reparation; and (4) that the labourers employed were too ignorant to cheat and too illiterate to combine. The new shrine waxed and prospered exceedingly, and on the Thursday following its dedication an epileptic, having made use of the water, was restored to a normal, and even commonplace, state of mind. On the Friday a girl, who said that she had been haunted by devils (though until then no one had heard of the matter), declared, upon drinking a cup from the spring of St. Loup, that she was now haunted by angels--a very much pleasanter condition of affairs. The Sunday following, the village usurer, who called himself Bertollin, but who was known to be a wicked foreigner from beyond the Alps, of the true name of Bertolino, ran into the inn like one demented, and threw down the total of his ill-gotten gains for the benefit of the shrine. They amounted, indeed, to but a hundred francs, but then his clientèle were close and skin-flint, as peasant proprietors and free men generally are the world over; and it was well known that the cobbler, who had himself borrowed a small sum for a month, and quadrupled it in setting up lodgings for artists, had been unable to recover from the usurer the mending of his boots.