My excellent mother it was who, in an access of devotion, devised the excursion; and the governor, hearing that the locality was a barbarous one, and the regimen a strict fast, fancied, of course, it would be a most economical dodge, at once agreed; but, by Jove! the saving is a delusion and a snare. Two miserable rooms, dirty and ill furnished, cost forty francs a day; bad coffee and black bread, for breakfast, are supplied at four francs a head; dinner--if by such a name one would designate a starved kid stewed in garlic, or a boiled hedgehog with chiccory sauce,--ten francs each; sour wine at the price of Château Lafitte; and a seat in the sanctuary, to see the Virgin, four times as dear as a stall at the Italian Opera. Exorbitant as all these charges are, we are gravely assured that they will be doubled whenever the Virgin sneezes again, that being the manifestation, as they call it, by which she displays her satisfaction at our presence here. I do not fancy talking irreverently of these things, Bob, but I own to you I am ineffably shocked at the gross impositions innkeepers, postmasters, donkey-owners, and others practise by trading on the devotional feelings and pious aspirations of weak but worthy people. I say nothing of the priests themselves; they may or may not believe all these miraculous occurrences. One thing, however, is clear: they make every opportunity of judging of them so costly that only a rich man can afford himself the luxury, so that you and I, and a hundred others like us, may either succumb or scoff, as we please, without any means of correcting our convictions. One inevitable result ensues from this. There are two camps: the Faithful, who believe everything, and are cheated by every imaginable device of mock relics and made-up miracles; and the Unbelieving, who actually rush into ostentatious vice, to show their dislike to hypocrisy! Thus, this little dirty village, swarming with priests, and resounding with the tramp of processions, is a den of every kind of dissipation. The rattle of the dice-box mingles with the nasal chantings of the tonsured monks, and the wild orgies of a drinking party blend with the strains of the organ! If men be not religiously minded, the contact with the Church seems to make demons of them. How otherwise interpret the scoff and mockery that unceasingly go forward against priests and priestcraft in a little community, as it were, separated for acts of piety and devotion?