sense of this common national revival imparted the same impulse to the inhabitants of distant provinces. To consecrate the bond of brotherly union, to seal their fidelity to the new Order, to vow mutual assistance in danger or distress, was the motive of these fraternal Feasts, which sent forth holiday-making crowds on joyful pilgrimages to the altars of the Federation. From Brest to Bordeaux, along the heaths of desolate Brittany and through the rich Norman pastures, over the rolling hills and mountainous fastnesses of picturesque Limosin, by the sounding shores of the Bay of Biscay, amid the orange-scented groves of Provence, the people were marching, with waving banners, to the strains of the Ça Ira, and converging to centres of meeting in the provincial capitals.
Before the sunrise of May the 30th, in the dewy freshness of morning, patriotic crowds were pouring through the gates of Lyons. As many as fifty or sixty thousand Federates, and two hundred thousand people in all, took their way through the plain bordering the shores of the blue winding Rhone, towards the Altar of Concord, where a colossal statue of Liberty rose through the silvery morning mists. Amid that moving throng of men with their waving flags, of women and girls festively clad, bearing palm-branches and crowned with flowers, there went one, radiant and resolute, stepping out like a goddess of old, herself, in her immaculate strength and purity, the living realisation of the liberty they adored. We know her, walking there by the side of the austere Roland, surrounded by a small group friends; but the Revolution knew her not as yet, the highest of its heroic hearts.
It knew her not, though already it received her
