I thanked her, and she climbed up to her home.
This gully was the precipitous bed of a stream; I clanked down
it - thousands of feet - warily; I reached the valley, and at last, very
gladly, came to a drain, and thus knew that I approached a town or
village. It was St Ursanne.
The very first thing I noticed in St Ursanne was the extraordinary
shape of the lower windows of the church. They lighted a crypt and ran
along the ground, which in itself was sufficiently remarkable, but
much more remarkable was their shape, which seemed to me to approach
that of a horseshoe; I never saw such a thing before. It looked as
though the weight of the church above had bulged these little windows
out, and that is the way I explain it. Some people would say it was a
man coming home from the Crusades that had made them this eastern way,
others that it was a symbol of something or other. But I say -
LECTOR. What rhodomontade and pedantry is this talk about the shape of
a window?
AUCTOR. Little friend, how little you know! To a building windows are
everything; they are what eyes are to a man. Out of windows a building
takes its view; in windows the outlook of its human inhabitants is
framed. If you were the lord of a very high tower overlooking a town,
a plain, a river, and a distant hill (I doubt if you will ever have
such luck!), would you not call your architect up before you and say -
'Sir, see that the windows of my house are _tall, narrow, thick_, and
have a _round top to them'?_
Of course you would, for thus you would best catch in separate
pictures the sunlit things outside your home.
Never ridicule windows. It is out of windows that many fall to their
deaths. By windows love often enters. Through a window went the bolt
that killed King Richard. King William's father spied Arlette from a
window (I have looked through it myself, but not a soul did I see
washing below). When a mob would rule England, it breaks windows, and
when a patriot would save her, he taxes them. Out of windows we walk
on to lawns in summer and meet men and women, and in winter windows
are drums for the splendid music of storms that makes us feel so
masterly round our fires. The windows of the great cathedrals are all
their meaning. But for windows we should have to go out-of-doors to
see daylight. After the sun, which they serve, I know of nothing so
beneficent as windows. Fie upon the ungrateful man that has no
window-god in his house, and thinks himself too great a philosopher to
bow down to windows!
