, has some history to relate. Julien had had no
experiences of this peaceful family life, during which are stored
up such treasures of childhood's recollections. He was the son of a
government official, who had been trotted over all France at the
caprice of the administration, and he had never known, so to speak, any
associations of the land in which he was born, or the hearth on which
he was raised. Chance had located his birth in a small town among the
Pyrenees, and when he was two years old he had been transplanted to one
of the industrial cities of Artois. At the end of two years more
came another removal to one of the midland towns, and thus his tender
childhood had been buffeted about, from east to west, from north to
south, taking root nowhere. All he could remember of these early years
was an unpleasant impression of hasty packing and removal, of long
journeys by diligence, and of uncomfortable resettling. His mother had
died just as he was entering upon his eighth year; his father, absorbed
in official work, and not caring to leave the child to the management
of servants, had placed him at that early age in a college directed
by priests. Julien thus passed his second term of childhood, and his
boyhood was spent behind these stern, gloomy walls, bending resignedly
under a discipline which, though gentle, was narrow and suspicious,
and allowed little scope for personal development. He obtained only
occasional glimpses of nature during the monotonous daily walks across
a flat, meaningless country. At very rare intervals, one of his father's
colleagues would take him visiting; but these stiff and ceremonious
calls only left a wearisome sensation of restraint and dull fatigue.
During the long vacation he used to rejoin his father, whom he almost
always found in a new residence. The poor man had alighted there for
a time, like a bird on a tree; and among these continually shifting
scenes, the lad had felt himself more than ever a stranger among
strangers; so that he experienced always a secret though joyless
satisfaction in returning to the cloisters of the St. Hilaire college
and submitting himself to the yoke of the paternal but inflexible
discipline of the Church.

He was naturally inclined, by the tenderness of his nature, toward a
devotional life, and accepted with blind confidence the religious
and moral teaching of the reverend fathers. A doctrine which preached
separation from profane things; the attractions