covered that he was "bust "" et preterea" almost "nihil”: his legs were the shortest I ever saw. However, he was very genial, and so was the hump-backed boy who sat with him, and hissed at the mules when they seemed about to fall fast asleep.

I was the only passenger for the monastery. It was not an inviting day for the pious pilgrims who, in bright weather, come out from Barcelona by the score, for a three days' holiday above the clouds. The Montserrat letter-bag accompanied us, for the hump-backed boy to sit upon.

Hardly had we begun to descend into the valley of the Llobrecat than the rain fell fast and furious about us. The river was already raging along with a thunderous uproar, when we crossed it and came to a halt by a ramshackle old inn with some singular blotches of green damp on its white face. Here I was told it was customary for passengers to take their breakfast. The coach would wait with pleasure as long as I chose; it was nothing to the fathers up in the clouds if they got their letters an hour or two late. The ramshackle old inn had, however, little in it worth waiting for, except the pretty daughter of the landlady. This fair damsel served me several courses of nasty things with such dulcet smiles that I forgave them their badness. But she would not bear analysis. The extreme attractiveness of Spanish eyes is certainly rather odd, especially when one considers that the eyes are, as often as not, accompanied by preposterous noses, immeasurable mouths, and ears large and roomy enough to hear what is transpiring in the Antipodes.

The meal ended, and a promise given to revisit the inn on the way back, we resumed our damp journey. It was now all upward motion. We were on one of the thighs of Montserrat. Slowly the olive orchards and vineyards of the lower slopes gave way to the wild untrammelled woods, and the perfumed scrub of the south. We went at a snail's pace, though the road is one of the best in Spain, and the gradient none so severe. But for the occasional downward vistas, it would have been wearisome, and I should have felt no scruple in slumbering, in spite of the civil attentions of my two friends. The boy would have heaped wet lavender and cistus flowers from my knees to my chin, had I not persuaded him to desist, and his master offered me his cigarette-case time after time. We trifled with many subjects of conversation, of which the most engrossing to the driver was

the matter of his wages. If I remember right, he thought three francs a working day much too little. The poor fellow's bust alone was worth at least five. There chanced to be a strike in Barcelona at the time, and he was in full sympathy with it.

Just before we came in sight of the monastery, by working round the corner of an enormous face of white rock about a thousand feet perpendicular, the sky cleared a little. It was most opportune. In one moment I was able to grasp the situation of the building, and perceive the very eccentric outline of the peaks themselves. I say " peaks" advisedly; for the mountain is a cluster of vertical rocks, looking for all the world like gigantic sugar-loaves many hundreds of feet high. I would also compare the mountain and the monastery together to a loaf of bread on the surface of a butcher's block, with tall candles set behind the bread. The area of the butcher's block will then fairly represent the little plateau upon which the monastery is built, about two thousand feet above the river Llobrecat; while the candles may stand very well for the higher points of the mountain. It is really a most sensational mountain, and I did not dissemble my delight with it.

But, as if satisfied to let us see thus much only, the clouds once again swept down the white sides of Montserrat, blotting out everything above and below us, and when, a few minutes later, we ascended slowly under certain dainty feats of masonry by the base of the precipice just mentioned, all was wet and cold and uncheering.

The towering mass of the building itself was now close to us. Passing a little chapel or hermitage, we skirted its great walls until the porch was reached, and then, with a pompous clatter, as if we had all the crowned heads of Europe inside the car, we rioted into the courtyard of the monastery. Perhaps a dozen noses peered forth at us from different doors to see what we had brought, but they made no movement into the rain to greet me.

Now, I had had visions of a welcome like that of a Greek monastery previously informed of one's coming. I looked for a group of excited and beaming fathers of the church, flowing of beard and eager-eyed, all stretching out their hands at the same moment, and showering blessings upon the stranger's happy head. And next I was prepared to be led by the superior, with his arm round my neck, into a spacious divaned room where

strong drinks and coffee, biscuits and sweetmeats and fragrant latakia should be pressed upon me with no pretext for denial. And I further expected to be tormented by the many fleas which love monastic retreats, and there increase and multiply in no terror of their lives.

But it was nothing of the kind here at Montserrat. The monastery is now a-days too much an incident of civilisation : something sufficiently out of the common to be interesting, but by no means conducted in an archaic mode. It is a place to which cheap trips are sped, and whence, on fine days, in summer, from twenty to fifty picnic parties start for the summit in vivacious processions, with hampers. Of course, therefore, old crusted hospitality is here a thing of the past: it is only a matter of pounds, shillings, and pence. The place is "run," to use an Americanism, upon methodical principles.

I looked about me in the slobber of rain, and found that I was in the middle of an irregular quadrangle, three sides of which were bordered by buildings of five or six storeys, newish, and furnished with small, not inelegant windows. Upon one of the sides, the pleasant word "restaurant" caught the eye, and stimulated appetite. On the side opposite the restaurant there was a medley. Fragments of mediæval building still stood up in the midst of a cumber of old ruin and new material. Windows and arches of Byzantine outline could be seen in the walls, and certain gross capitals also whispered of the centuries. But the ringing of chisels and the echo of the voices of toiling masons told how these things were in peril of passing away even while I gazed upon them. The monastery stood in all its early splendour until Suchet's Frenchmen looted it, less than a hundred years ago. These rogues were not content with capturing the famous Virgin of Montserrat, and plundering in other ways, but they also set fire to the monastic buildings, and chased the hermits from their little hermitages on the peaks above the monastery. Montserrat's recovery from this disaster has been very slow. It is no longer an establishment devoted wholly to monks. Only a few priests are in the building, and a score or two of youths and boys in training for missionaries in foreign parts. By far the greater part of the spacious edifices in the precincts of the chapel are modern, and entirely applied to the service of pilgrims from the nether world.

I, too, was a pilgrim. It therefore behoved me to secure a bedroom as soon as possible-and a candle. For the latter I paid twopence in the store. The bedroom was left to my generosity. I was directed to a building with the words, "Despacho de aposentos" over it. This means "Accommodation. Office." Having written my name in a book, I was politely presented with a key, and given in charge of a young Spaniard with a well-cropped head, and he took me to the block dedicated to S. Theresa of Jesus. Other blocks were under the protection of SS. Ignatius, Gertrude, Leander, etc., but S. Theresa's was one of the handsomest. At the porch of the block was a barber's sign, and a sweet savour of ointments. We ascended stone steps to the second floor. Here was a corridor with perhaps twenty doors opening out of it, and No 19 was apportioned to me. I was further told that my key commanded the exclusive approach to a little useful chamber at the end of the corridor. It was all very agreeable, and airy, and clean.

The bed-room was quite palatial for a pilgrim. It had snowy walls, and yellow wooden rafters. The floor was of red flags, free from dirt. In a recess were two iron bedsteads, upon which a couple of mattresses of maize husks were rolled up in seemly order. A curtain of Manchester chintz was at the disposal of the pilgrim, when he wished to boycott his bed-chamber. Also there was a small basin and a huge jug of water, a clothes peg, a table, and three rush-bottomed chairs. A vase of flowers was an enlivening luxury. The boy asked if I would like a liittle warm water for washing purposes, and then left me with a most affable salutation. After which I leaned on my windowsill and looked forth at the mountain before me. I had the luck to face a bold spur of rock, which soared upwards into the clouds with as little deviation from the vertical as the nose of an ancient Greek. Below me was the quadrangle, in a sheltered part of which three waiters, in decent black, with white napkins their forearms, were playing marbles with a certain. irreverent amount of noise and laughter.

When I purchased my candle, I bought at the same time a convenient, small, blue book called "The Friend of the Pilgrim to Montserrat." It was a sort of hand-book of the question and answer school, with cuts, and very amusing. It informed me that though I had brought a letter of introduction from the

Pope himself, I should have been received no better than I was received.

Certain of the customs of the monastery, which I cull from this small book, deserve to be recorded in brief translation for the good of my readers.

"How much," asks the visitor of the boy who is his guide, "must one pay for one's room and service?"

"A.-The monastery gives hospitality to all, gratuitously. It asks nothing. It only accepts something as alms, to support the establishment: just what each gentleman thinks proper to give.

"Q.-And supposing a person goes off without giving anything?

"A.-No matter if he does. Nor will it be thrown in his face if he returns to us another day.

"Q.-How long may one stay here?

"A. Three days. And during May, June, July and August it is indispensable to have been away from the Monastery at least three weeks before you can come again; and a month in September and October."

This and much more I learnt from the little book. At the outset it had seemed possible to regard the establishment as a desirable and picturesque place of sojourn a refuge from creditors or domestic trouble. But no. Spite of the guide book, it was soon apparent that a purse is as necessary in Montserrat as in London. "That the charitably-disposed visitor may not be deprived of the privilege of alms-giving, a servitor of the monastery goes round periodically to collect alms for the poor." This privilege I was deprived of. As I chanced to be the only inmate of the S. Theresa lodging-house, the servitor possibly did not think it worth while to call upon me.

In the office of accommodation, I had further seen a printed form of regulations, which were at first somewhat embarrassing. Article I. said, "No one admitted except he be a Roman Catholic."

However, I was not summoned to make affidavit of my beliefs, nor did I volunteer a confession of faith.

From Article III. I learnt that "if a guest falls ill, he will have to pay for it."

Than which of course nothing could be more reasonable. Το