We could not leave Hyères without performing a pilgrimage to Notre Dame de Consolation, the old church on a hill overlooking the coast. The ascent is marked by the Way of the Cross rudely painted in small niches of masonry by the side of the road. When we were last here, there was a daily Mass said by a hermit‐priest. He had some years previously tried his vocation at the Carmelites’, and had not succeeded. But the impulse to seek utter solitude was too strong to be resisted; and for a long time he had lived in the surrounding mountains, a veritable hermit, subsisting upon the poorest fare, which was brought to him at regular intervals by the peasants. Whether he had erected a hut for himself, or lived in a cave, I never learnt; but when the bishop of the diocese became aware of the fact, he thought it to be regretted that a priest should not celebrate Mass, and proposed to him that he should live in one of the small rooms of the deserted convent which is attached to the Church of Our Lady of Consolation, take care of the church, and say Mass. This offer he gladly accepted; and there he resided for some time. We used to go sometimes, on a bright spring morning, to attend his Mass. Our breakfast was packed in a basket, and hung to the pommel of my donkey’s saddle, to be eaten afterwards on the top of the low, semi‐circular wall which encloses a piece of ground in front of the church. I always looked with a special interest, not altogether unmingled with curiosity, at the slight, bent figure of the priest, who could not be more than forty years of age, as he emerged from the door of the sacristy, and, with eyes so cast down that they seemed closed, passed by us to the altar. Who shall say what had called up that deep thirst for utter solitude and silence which had driven him to so extreme a life? Was it some calamity, or some crime, or only—as is far more probable—that strange instinct which is implanted in the nature of some men to flee their kind, and be alone with themselves—an instinct which possibly many have felt stirring within them at odd moments, but which, when touched by divine grace, grows into a wonderful and exceptional vocation; once more common, in the early days of Christianity, when the whole world lay in pagan luxury and gilded vice, and which even our subduing, taming, commonplace civilization fails in some rare cases to smother in the soul?