Page:The Advancement of Learning (Wright, 5th ed).pdf/14

entered the Society on the 27th of June previous. He was subsequently ‘entrusted with some message or advertisement to the Queen; which having performed with great approbation, he returned back into France again, with intention to continue for some years there.’ (Rawley.) Here we find him still keen in his observation of natural phenomena, sounds as before occupying a great share of his attention. Let him describe what he heard in his own words written nearly fifty years later. ‘For echoes upon echoes, there is a rare instance thereof in a place which I will now exactly describe. It is some three or four miles from Paris, near a town called Pont-Charenton; and some bird-bolt shot or more from the river of Seine. The room is a chapel or small church. The walls all standing, both at the sides and at the ends. Two rows of pillars, after the manner of aisles of churches, also standing; the roof all open, not so much as any embowment near any of the walls left. ‘There was against every pillar a stack of billets above a man’s height; which the watermen that bring wood down the Seine in stacks, and not in boats, laid there (as it seemeth) for their ease. Speaking at the one end, I did hear it return the voice thirteen several times: and I have heard of others, that it would return sixteen times: for I was there about three of the clock in the afternoon; and it is best (as all other echoes are) in the evening. .... I remember well, that when I went to the echo at Pont-Charenton, there was an old Parisian, who took it to be the work of spirits, and of good spirits. For (said he) call Satan, and the echo will not deliver back the devil’s name; but will say, va t’en; which is as much in French as apage or avoid. And thereby I did hap to find that an echo would not return S, being but a hissing and an interior sound.’ (Sylva Sylvarum, cent. iii. 249, 251.) Another story which he tells of himself belongs to this period of his life. ‘I had, from my childhood, a wart upon one of my fingers: afterwards, when I was about sixteen years old, being then at Paris, there grew upon both my hands a number of warts (at the least an hundred) in a month’s space. The English ambassador’s lady, who was a woman far from superstition, told me one day,