i85o 185 So I contrived some loops out of twine that I attached to my button-holes, allowing of extension if need be. We had a sumptuous dinner, sixteen dishes, and much persuasion to fill the plate each time. After about the tenth, I saw distress mantling my father's countenance, and great drops of agony forming on his brow. Happily what with the muscular tissue about the paunch being far more elastic in youth than in age, and, assisted by the loops of string, I got safely through the ordeal. When we left, I threw myself on my fathers bosom, and said : " Oh, thank goodness, mamma had not to1 go through it all. Her stay-laces would have given way." My mother had been invited, but an excuse for her was found in the baby. That baby was Edward Drake, born fourteen years after my second brother William. We always called him " The Appendix." He was curiously like the Sabine family and not the Barings, Goulds or Bonds. From Argelez an easy walk takes one to the Val de Bergon, where there is an intermittent spring, very capricious in its proceedings, condemning the little mill worked by the stream from it to periodical inaction. Here in the limestone precipice is a cave that served as a church during the Revolution. The rudely constructed altar remained, as well as some portions of the enclosing wall to prevent observation, and scratched on the rock " Dieu de nos amours, ayez pitie de nous, miserables." The priest was hidden high up in the mountains in some shepherd's cot. He descended to meet the pious peasants and minister to them, every Sunday morning, and the secret of this gathering was well kept. On the road to the Val de Bergon, in the outskirts of Argelez, screened by trees and above the road, on the steep slope of the hill, is the Balandrau, or wonderful stone. It is a mass of rock poised on a slanting platform, and sustained in position by one smaller and of a different formation, set on a point. It much resembles a so-called tolmen such as we have, or rather had> on Staple Tor, that the quarrymen have destroyed. This latter was conjectured by the Rev. Atkyns Bray to have been employed as a test in criminal cases, the supposed criminal being required to prove his innocence by crawling under the quoit without displacing the supporter, much as S. Wilfrid's needle formerly served at Ripon in the crypt under the Minster, But
