ly
chanters, the chaplains, the canons themselves, who finally played out
the game with all the decorum of an ecclesiastical ceremony. It was
just then, just as the canons took the ball to themselves so gravely,
that Denys--Denys l'Auxerrois, as he was afterwards called--appeared
for the first time. Leaping in among the timid children, he made the
thing really a game. The boys played like boys, the men almost like
madmen, and all with a delightful glee which became contagious, first
in the clerical body, and then among the spectators. The aged Dean of
the Chapter, Protonotary of his Holiness, held up his purple skirt a
little higher, and stepping from the ranks with an amazing levity, as
if suddenly relieved of his burden of eighty years, tossed the ball
with his foot to the venerable capitular Homilist, equal to the
occasion. And then, unable to stand inactive any longer, the laity
carried on the game among themselves, with shouts of not too boisterous
amusement; the sport continuing till the flight of the ball could no
longer be traced along the dusky aisles.

Though the home of his childhood was but a humble one--one of those
little cliff-houses cut out in the low chalky hillside, such as are
still to be found with inhabitants in certain districts of France-there
were some who connected his birth with the story of a beautiful country
girl, who, about eighteen years before, had been taken from her own
people, not unwillingly, for the pleasure of the Count of Auxerre. She
had wished indeed to see the great lord, who had sought her privately,
in the glory of his own house; but, terrified by the strange splendours
of her new abode and manner of life, and the anger of the true wife,
she had fled suddenly from the place during the confusion of a violent
storm, and in her flight given birth prematurely to a child. The child,
a singularly fair one, was found alive, but the mother dead, by
lightning-stroke as it seemed, not far from her lord's chamber-door,
under the shelter of a ruined ivy-clad tower. Denys himself certainly
was a joyous lad enough. At the cliff-side cottage, nestling actually
beneath the vineyards, he came to be an unrivalled gardener, and, grown
to manhood, brought his produce to market, keeping a stall in the great
cathedral square for the sale of melons and pomegranates, all manner of
seeds and flowers (omnia speciosa camporum), honey also, wax tapers,
sweetmeats hot from the frying-pan, rough home-made