as approaching.

The Bishop understood this; time pressed; it was as a priest that he had
come: from extreme coldness he had passed by degrees to extreme emotion;
he gazed at those closed eyes, he took that wrinkled, aged and ice-cold
hand in his, and bent over the dying man.

"This hour is the hour of God. Do you not think that it would be
regrettable if we had met in vain?"

The conventionary opened his eyes again. A gravity mingled with gloom
was imprinted on his countenance.

"Bishop," said he, with a slowness which probably arose more from his
dignity of soul than from the failing of his strength, "I have passed my
life in meditation, study, and contemplation. I was sixty years of age
when my country called me and commanded me to concern myself with its
affairs. I obeyed. Abuses existed, I combated them; tyrannies existed,
I destroyed them; rights and principles existed, I proclaimed and
confessed them. Our territory was invaded, I defended it; France was
menaced, I offered my breast. I was not rich; I am poor. I have been one
of the masters of the state; the vaults of the treasury were encumbered
with specie to such a degree that we were forced to shore up the walls,
which were on the point of bursting beneath the weight of gold and
silver; I dined in Dead Tree Street, at twenty-two sous. I have succored
the oppressed, I have comforted the suffering. I tore the cloth from
the altar, it is true; but it was to bind up the wounds of my country. I
have always upheld the march forward of the human race, forward towards
the light, and I have sometimes resisted progress without pity. I have,
when the occasion offered, protected my own adversaries, men of your
profession. And there is at Peteghem, in Flanders, at the very spot
where the Merovingian kings had their summer palace, a convent of
Urbanists, the Abbey of Sainte Claire en Beaulieu, which I saved in
1793. I have done my duty according to my powers, and all the good
that I was able. After which, I was hunted down, pursued, persecuted,
blackened, jeered at, scorned, cursed, proscribed. For many years past,
I with my white hair have been conscious that many people think they
have the right to despise me; to the poor ignorant masses I present the
visage of one damned. And I accept this isolation of hatred, without
hating any one myself. Now I am eighty-six years old; I am on the point
of death. What is it that you have come to ask of me?"

"Your blessing," said