An Idyll of Fribourg

...that it had once been theirs, and had played a part in the Reformation...

...It was with a feeling as of, the crowning of a friend that he read, much later, of his canonization...

...Comfortably bourgeois on the outside, the interior of the house, all vaulted in stone, stone flagged even in the upper parts, was paneled in the living-rooms in age-old black oak...

...On the inner tip of the bend lay the lower town, on a strip of detritus, connected with the upper town by a street on end, or intermittent stairway down the cliff...

...orchard, poultry yard, piggery, playground and kitchen garden where ond might have expected the tilting field...

...The "collegiens" were dimly aware that the dark shadow of "the Jesuits" hung over the place...

...on the side across the river, opposite the bend, an outer wall wandered over the hills, making impregnable the difficult descent to the river over the farther cliff...

...In the centre rose the cathedral, famous for generations back for its great organ...

...The nice, quiet, brown old gentleman was a true friend...

...Three languages prevailed in the town: down below, rough Swiss German...

...in the Haute-Ville, French, and, as in all the country round about, the language of the "armaillis," called a dialect, but more nearly a submerged tongue...

...It was great comfort to escape from hazing and badgering, and to sit hidden and very still in his corner, wondering who he was and what he had done in that place...

...Down in a dark comer of the old church, under the altar of the last side chapel, on the left of the great door opening outside of the walls, lay an object of fascination to this same small foreigner: a brown little mummy of a man, a Jesuit and apparently a personage, for he had a Latin inscription on the glass front of his tomb, and his name: Peter Canisius...

...Near the land wall rose a straight, round hill, approached by a steep, cobbled street and a long, vnnding, covered staircase, crowned by the turreted, castle-like college of Saint Michel, heavily walled, stone corridored, its ancient knightly fish pond in the centre...

...who were the spiritual great-nephews of John Carroll and the spiritual cousins of his own archbishop, James Gibbons...

...Very peaceful, rather, very kindly, and an enormous help to a small boy very lost in a strange language, utterly strange customs, among a couple of hundred boys of all sizes andj all degrees of torturing ingenuity, who looked upon him either as a redskin from the outer wilderness, or with the intense and over-personal curiosity given to a freak in a circus side-show...

...He had known very well at home those courtly, scholarly and kindly Jesuits who were the intervening link between the royal schools of Europe and our own American expansion...

...Somehow or other he seemed to understand loneliness, perhaps because he had been left behind, and because he, too, was in a country and among people strange to him...

...a mediaeval city stronghold of the Zaehringens furnished to modern needs...

...It was with awe that the boy learned, later, what a personage he was...

...One was not used to bodies in glass cases, under altars, in America, but he was not a terrifying old gentleman...

...famous at that time in a very living way through its bishop, Monseigneur Mermillod, the old lion of the Kulturkampf, the silver clarion of Switzerland's religious battle...

...A stout wall and defense towers held the land side...

...The town stands on a blufE,^ at a bend in the swift green and white Sarine River enclosing it on three sides, several hundred feet below...

...Fribourg was a town of the middle-ages, undisturbed by a new railway station, by its two great suspension bridges over the Sarine gorges, or even by the new and famous Catholic University...

...Very few of them, though, knew exactly what a Jesuit looked like or did, except the one foreigner in the place, the twelve-year-old American from the Grand'rue...

...On the cliff edge of the town hung the solid houses of the local aristocracy—a decent, not too modern face turned to the city street, the rear descending (at least in the thousand-year-old dwelling these Americans lived in) through cellar after cellar and subterranean passages, to a legendary egress under the principal church of the Basse-Ville— an exploration forbidden to boys under all the parental and municipal pains devisable...