238 OCCASIONAL HAPPY THOUGHTS. 



tians build the Pyramids? How did the Druids pile up 

 Stonehenge? We don't know." 



The list of things that my Well-informed Friend will have 

 to " look up " when he " gets back among his books " must 

 have amounted to a considerable number by the time he 

 quitted us at Mont St, Michel, where, on seeing a pilgrimage, 

 he observed, " History repeats itself ; " but on being ques- 

 tioned by us as to the particular instance that came to his 

 mind at that moment, he returned, " Why, don't you recol- 

 lect, before the return of Louis the Eighteenth, or Charles 

 the Tenth — or — let me see which was it came first ? " 



This was another item, to be added to his list. Mont 

 St. Michel is, as all the world knows from Stanfield's pic- 

 tures (I think he painted it two or three times), a spot 

 marvellously wild and romantic. The monastery, the 

 fortress, and the houses have perched themselves on the 

 rock, like the sea-birds on Puffin Island. The monastery 

 belongs, I beheve, to Friars Preachers ; " Friars Perchers " 

 would be a name more in accordance with the situation of 

 their monastic nest. From Avranches, from Coutances, on 

 the one side, from Dol, Dinan, Ponterson on the other, and, 

 indeed, from every place in Normandy, or Brittany, lying 

 within forty miles of Mont St. Michel, came omnibuses, 

 caleches, waggons with springs, waggons without springs, 

 diligences of a fashion that must have been out of date 

 in eighteen thirty, carts covered, carts uncovered, in fact 

 every sort of vehicle imaginable and unimaginable, drawn by 

 animals of all shapes and sizes, on their first legs and on their 

 last legs, crowded (the vehicles, I mean) inside and outside 



