, "to find you so cheerful as you be.
An occupation like this goin' out o' your life--I reckoned you might feel
it, a'most like the loss of a limb."

"A man o' my age ought to wean hisself from things earthly," said the old
man; "an' besides, I've a-got _you_."

"Hey?"

"Henceforth I've a-got you, an' all to yourself."

"Seems a funny thing," mused the Elder; "an' you at this moment owin' me
no less than seventy-five pound!"

Sam Tregenza settled himself down in his chair and nodded as he lit pipe.
"Nothin' like friendship, after all," he said. "Now you're talkin'
comfortable!"

[1] Playing truant.

A JEST OF AMBIALET.

He who has not seen Ambialet, in the Albigeois, has missed a wonder of the
world. The village rests in a saddle of crystalline rock between two
rushing streams, which are yet one and the same river; for the Tarn
(as it is called), pouring down from the Cevennes, is met and turned by
this harder ridge, and glances along one flank of Ambialet, to sweep
around a wooded promontory and double back on the other. So complete is
the loop that, while it measures a good two miles in circuit, across the
neck of it, where the houses cluster, you might fling a pebble over their
roofs from stream to stream.

High on the crupper of this saddle is perched a ruined castle, with a
church below it, and a cross and a graveyard on the cliff's edge; high on
the pommel you climb to another cross, beside a dilapidated house of
religion, the Priory of Notre Dame de l'Oder.

From the town--for Ambialet was once a town, and a flourishing one--you
mount to the Priory by a Via Crucis, zigzagging by clusters of purple
marjoram and golden St. John's wort. Above these come broom and heather
and bracken, dwarf oaks and junipers, box-trees and stunted
chestnut-trees; and, yet above, on the summit, short turf and thyme, which
the wind keeps close-trimmed about the base of the cross.

The Priory, hard by, houses a number of lads whom Pere Philibert does his
best to train for the religious life; but its church has been closed by
order of the Government, and tall mulleins sprout between the broad steps
leading to the porch. Pere Philibert will tell you of a time when these
steps were worn by thousands of devout feet, and of the cause which
brought them.

A little below the summit you passed a railed box-tree, with an image of
the Virgin against it. Here a palmer, travelling homeward from the Holy
Land, planted his