A larger proportion of the public pleasures of Europe were bound up with religious ceremony than is the case at present; and as regards pilgrimage, the reference above to the subject in general needs to be supplemented by some details concerning the relics, since there is no room for doubt as to whether or not they held their ground as "sights," the more so inasmuch as a sceptical attitude did not become a conventional habit of mind until, to judge by tourists' books, about the third quarter of the seventeenth century. At the abbey of Marmoutier, near Tours, for example, was shown a vessel which had been sent from Heaven filled with oil for the healing of St. Martin's leg, a breakage of which the devil had caused by taking away the stairs. They also showed a vast barrel wherein St. Martin kept his wine; but not till 1675 does any one remark that that was probably the fiend who stole away the stairs. Disbelief finds expression in plenty, it is true, but it is always that of the Protestant who disbelieves, not because his reason tells him the tale must be false, but because Roman Catholicism affirms it to be true. When there was no suspicion of a friar at the back of the story, there was nothing they would not swallow: even Evelyn accepts Mettius Curtius and his chasm as if all four evangelists had guaranteed both; or, to take a still better example, that of the monument near Leyden to the lady who had 365 children at one birth—(she had laughed at a poor woman's tale that the latter's two babies were twins, and the woman had expressed a hope that the lady might give birth to as many children at one confinement as there were days in the year)—Münster, the great Protestant geographer, repeats the story without throwing doubt, and consequently one tourist after another has no hesitation about it.