There is not a place of pilgrimage in France without some special natural attraction, from Mont St. Michel on the stormy northern coast to Notre Dame de la Garde overlooking the blue Mediterranean Sea; from Notre Dame de Buglose on a broad moor of the Landes to Notre Dame de la Salette among the wild Alps of Dauphiné; but not one of these has the peculiar charm of Notre Dame de Roc Amadour in Quercy, which stands on an almost inaccessible cliff overhanging a frightful ravine once known as the _Vallée Ténébreuse_. And not only nature, but history, poetry, and the supernatural, all combine to render this one of the most extraordinary of the many holy sanctuaries of France. For this is the place where, as hoary legends tell, the Zaccheus of the Scriptures ended his days in a cave; where the peerless Roland hung up his redoubtable sword before the altar of the Virgin; where Henry II. of England, Louis IX. of France, and so many princes and knights of the middle ages came to pay their vows; where Fénelon, the celebrated Archbishop of Cambrai, was consecrated to the Virgin in his infancy, and where he came in later life to pray at his mother’s tomb; and which has been sung by mediæval poets and rendered for ever glorious by countless miracles of divine grace. On a pleasant spring morning we left Albi to visit the ancient province of Quercy. From the fertile valley of the Tarn, overlooked by the fine church of Notre Dame de la Drèche—the tutelar Madonna of the Albigeois—we entered a dreary, stony region beyond Cahuzac, then came into a charming country with wooded hills crowned with old towers and villages, as at Najac, where the railway passes through a tunnel directly beneath the ancient castle in the centre of the town, and crosses the Nexos on the other side of the hill, which we found merry with peasant women washing their linen in the clear stream and hanging it on the rocks to bleach in the hot sun. The whole region is full of wild ravines kept fresh by capricious streams and the shadows of the numerous hills. The wayside grows bright with scarlet poppies, the cherry-trees are snowy with blossoms, the low quince hedges are aflush with their rosy blooms, and the pretty gardens at the stations are full of flowers and shrubbery. We pass Capdenac, supposed by M. de Champollion to be the ancient Uxellodunum whose siege is related by Cæsar in his _Commentaries_, also on a high hill around which the river Lot turns abruptly and goes winding on through a delicious valley, the water as red as the soil, perhaps owing to the recent rains. Soon after the country becomes rocky and desolate again, with stone walls instead of flowering hedges, and flocks of sheep here and there nibbling the scant herbage among the rocks, looking very much inclined, as well they may, to give up trying to get a living. The whole region is flat, the earth is ghastly with the pale stones, everything is subdued in tone,