Let us, then, leave to the future that which belongs to the future, and let us hold ourselves, each one for his own account, ready to obey the impulse which it may please God to give us. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE LAST PILGRIMAGE TO MONT SAINT-MICHEL. When the traveller who is visiting the beautiful localities of the Channel Peninsula quits the southern faubourg of Avranches—a picturesque little town built of sparkling granite—a road, marked by a succession of rapid declivities, brings him to the shore of a large bay formed by the sinking of the coasts of Normandy and Brittany. Before him reaches, far away and out of sight, the flat extent of sands, furrowed by the rivers Sée, Sélunce, and Coësnon, whose silvery windings the eye can follow to a considerable distance. On the higher parts of these sands grows a fine kind of grass, the _poa_ of the salt-meadows, and which, mingled with marine plants and sand-weeds, furnishes a favorite pasture for sheep. The lower and barren portion of the sands disappears twice a day beneath the tide, which at times spreads gently and caressingly over them, while at others it rolls foaming in with precipitate fury, as if eager to pass its appointed boundary. At high tide nothing is visible but an immense lake, partially engirdled with hills; and in the distance, like a pyramid of granite, sometimes from the bosom of the waves, sometimes from the expanse of sand, rises a nearly circular rock, laden with constructions of various kinds intermingled with vigorous vegetation, and crowned by large and lofty buildings. This is the famous Mont Saint-Michel: _au péril de la mer—in periculo mortis_, as our fathers were wont to say in their strong and simple language, which, like nature, speaks in images. The first time we saw St. Michael’s Mount was in sailing from Southampton to St. Malo, towards four o’clock one bright morning in June. The early sunshine lighted up the higher part of the rock, with all its wealth of natural and architectural inequalities, in one blaze of gold, while its base lay still in shadow. The only illuminated object, rising from a purplish haze, its brightness heightened by the blue of sea and sky, above, beneath, and around, it appeared rather like an ethereal vision than anything of earth.