The farthest point south in our Easter scamper was Lourdes, to which I found that my companions were more bent on going than to any other possible place within our range. The attractions even of the Pass of Ronces-valles, of St. Sebastian, and the Pyrenean battle-fields of 1814, faded with them before those of the nineteenth-century Port Royal. At first I said I would not go. The fact is, I am one of the old-fashioned folk who hold that some day the kingdoms of this world are to become the kingdoms of Christ, and that all peoples are to be gathered “in one fold under one Shepherd.” It has always seemed to me that one of the surest ways of postponing that good time is to be suspicious of other faiths than our own; to accuse them of blind superstition and deliberate imposture; even to walk round their churches as if they were museums or picture-galleries, while people are kneeling in prayer. So I said “No”; I would stop on the terrace at Pau, with one of the most glorious views in the world to look at, and carefully examine Henry IV.’s château, or go and get a round of golf with my hibernating fellow-countrymen. I thought that the probable result of visiting Lourdes might be to make me more inclined to think a large section of my fellow-mortals dupes, and their priests humbugs--conclusions I was anxious to avoid. However, I changed my mind at the last moment, and am heartily glad I did. It is an easy twenty miles (about) from Pau, from which you run straight to the Pyrenees, and pull up in a green nook of the outlying lower mountains, where two valleys meet, which run back towards the higher snow-capped range. They looked so tempting to explore, as did also the grim old keep on the high rock which divides them and completely dominates the little town, that twenty years ago I couldn’t have resisted, and should have gone for an afternoon’s climb. But I am grown less lissom, if not wiser, and so took my place meekly in the fly which my companions had chartered for the grotto. We were through the little town in a few minutes, the only noteworthy thing being the number of women who offered us candles of all sizes to burn before the Madonna’s statue in the grotto, and the number of relic-shops. Emerging from the street, we found ourselves in front of a green lawn, at the other end of which was a fine white marble church, almost square, with a dome--more like a mosque, I thought, than a Western church; and up above this another tall Gothic church, with a fine spire, to which the pilgrims ascend by two splendid semi-circular flights of easy, broad steps, one on each side of the lower church, and holding it, as it were, in their arms. We, however, drove up the steep ascent outside the left or southern staircase, and got down at the door of the higher church, which is built on the rock at the bottom of which is the famous spring and grotto. We entered by a spacious porch, where my attention was at once arrested by the mural tablets of white marble,