said: "O Lord, Thou knowest our pride and our vanity,
hear us, and--"

Soon afterwards, with tearful eyes, he preached from the text:

"And the Light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it
not."

.......................

Five days later a little, uncouth man took off his hat in the chief
street of Quebec, and began to sing a song of Picardy to an air which no
man in French Canada had ever heard. Little farmers on their way to
the market by the Place de Cathedral stopped, listening, though
every moment's delay lessened their chances of getting a stand in the
market-place. Butchers and milkmen loitered, regardless of waiting
customers; a little company of soldiers caught up the chorus, and, to
avoid involuntary revolt, their sergeant halted them, that they might
listen. Gentlemen strolling by--doctor, lawyer, officer, idler--paused
and forgot the raw climate, for this marvellous voice in the unshapely
body warmed them, and they pushed in among the fast-gathering crowd.
Ladies hurrying by in their sleighs lost their hearts to the thrilling
notes of:

"Little grey fisherman,
Where is your daughter?
Where is your daughter so sweet?
Little grey man who comes Over the water,
I have knelt down at her feet,
Knelt at your Gabrielle's feet---ci ci!"

Presently the wife of the governor stepped out from her sleigh, and,
coming over, quickly took Parpon's cap from his hand and went round
among the crowd with it, gathering money.

"He is hungry, he is poor," she said, with tears in her eyes. She had
known the song in her childhood, and he who used to sing it to her was
in her sight no more. In vain the gentlemen would have taken the cap
from her; she gathered the money herself, and others followed, and
Parpon sang on.

A night later a crowd gathered in the great hall of the city, filling it
to the doors, to hear the dwarf sing. He came on the platform dressed
as he had entered the city, with heavy, home-made coat and trousers,
and moccasins, and a red woollen comforter about his neck--but this
comforter he took off when he began to sing. Old France and New France,
and the loves and hates and joys and sorrows of all lands, met that
night in the soul of this dwarf with the divine voice, who did not give
them his name, so that they called him, for want of a better title,
the Provencal. And again two nights afterwards it was the same, and yet