l day over his plot of indigo, and
at night he returned home to water his garden, and to read his books. At
that epoch, M. Mabeuf was nearly eighty years of age.

One evening he had a singular apparition.

He had returned home while it was still broad daylight. Mother
Plutarque, whose health was declining, was ill and in bed. He had dined
on a bone, on which a little meat lingered, and a bit of bread that he
had found on the kitchen table, and had seated himself on an overturned
stone post, which took the place of a bench in his garden.

Near this bench there rose, after the fashion in orchard-gardens, a sort
of large chest, of beams and planks, much dilapidated, a rabbit-hutch on
the ground floor, a fruit-closet on the first. There was nothing in the
hutch, but there were a few apples in the fruit-closet,--the remains of
the winter's provision.

M. Mabeuf had set himself to turning over and reading, with the aid of
his glasses, two books of which he was passionately fond and in which,
a serious thing at his age, he was interested. His natural timidity
rendered him accessible to the acceptance of superstitions in a certain
degree. The first of these books was the famous treatise of President
Delancre, De l'inconstance des Demons; the other was a quarto by Mutor
de la Rubaudiere, Sur les Diables de Vauvert et les Gobelins de la
Bievre. This last-mentioned old volume interested him all the more,
because his garden had been one of the spots haunted by goblins in
former times. The twilight had begun to whiten what was on high and to
blacken all below. As he read, over the top of the book which he held
in his hand, Father Mabeuf was surveying his plants, and among others a
magnificent rhododendron which was one of his consolations; four days of
heat, wind, and sun without a drop of rain, had passed; the stalks were
bending, the buds drooping, the leaves falling; all this needed water,
the rhododendron was particularly sad. Father Mabeuf was one of those
persons for whom plants have souls. The old man had toiled all day over
his indigo plot, he was worn out with fatigue, but he rose, laid
his books on the bench, and walked, all bent over and with tottering
footsteps, to the well, but when he had grasped the chain, he could not
even draw it sufficiently to unhook it. Then he turned round and cast a
glance of anguish toward heaven which was becoming studded with stars.

The evening had that serenity which overwhelms the tro