as finishing, blessed, in
the plenitude of nature, by that august old man, celebrated by the
alternate song of all the birds of Rocaillet."

Justin's one remaining hope is to go home to those native mountains, if
it may be, with the dead body of his boy, dead "the very morning on
which he should have received the tonsure from the hands of Mgr.
l'Archeveque," and buried now temporarily at the cemetery of
Montparnasse:--

Theodore calls me. I saw him distinctly to-night. He gave me a sign.
After all said, life is heavy, sans le fillot, and but [133] for you it
were well to be released from it....'

"I have seen Justin Lebasset die, dear Arribas, and was touched,
edified, to the bottom of my soul. God grant, when my hour comes, I
may find that calm, that force, in the last struggle with life. Not a
complaint! not a sigh! Once only he gave Norine a sorrowful,
heartrending look; then, from lips already cold, breathed that one
word, 'Theodore!' Marcus Aurelius used to say: 'A man should leave the
world as a ripe olive falls from the tree that bore it, and with a kiss
for the earth that nourished it.' Well! the peasant of Rocaillet had
the beautiful, noble, simple death of the fruit of the earth, going to
the common receptacle of all mortal beings, with no sense that he was
torn away. Pardon, I pray, my quotation from Marcus Aurelius, who
persecuted the Christians. I give it with the same respect with which
you would quote some holy writer. Ah! my dear Arribas! not all the
saints have received canonization."

It is to the priestly character, in truth, that M. Fabre always comes
back for tranquillizing [134] effect; and if his peasants have
something akin to Wordsworth's, his priests may remind one of those
solemn ecclesiastical heads familiar in the paintings and etchings of
M. Alphonse Legros. The reader travelling in Italy, or Belgium
perhaps, has doubtless visited one or more of those spacious
sacristies, introduced to which for the inspection of some more than
usually recherche work of art, one is presently dominated by their
reverend quiet: simple people coming and going there, devout, or at
least on devout business, with half-pitched voices, not without touches
of kindly humour, in what seems to express like a picture the most
genial side, midway between the altar and the home, of the
ecclesiastical life. Just such interiors we seem to visit under the
magic of M. Fabre's well-trained pen. He has a real