tions. To these he lovingly
returned.

'I lead you,' he would say, 'by the green pastures. My system, my
beliefs, my medicines, are resumed in one phrase--to avoid excess.
Blessed nature, healthy, temperate nature, abhors and exterminates
excess. Human law, in this matter, imitates at a great distance her
provisions; and we must strive to supplement the efforts of the law. Yes,
boy, we must be a law to ourselves and for ourselves and for our
neighbours--lex armata--armed, emphatic, tyrannous law. If you see a
crapulous human ruin snuffing, dash from him his box! The judge, though
in a way an admission of disease, is less offensive to me than either the
doctor or the priest. Above all the doctor--the doctor and the purulent
trash and garbage of his pharmacopoeia! Pure air--from the neighbourhood
of a pinetum for the sake of the turpentine--unadulterated wine, and the
reflections of an unsophisticated spirit in the presence of the works of
nature--these, my boy, are the best medical appliances and the best
religious comforts. Devote yourself to these. Hark! there are the bells
of Bourron (the wind is in the north, it will be fair). How clear and
airy is the sound! The nerves are harmonised and quieted; the mind
attuned to silence; and observe how easily and regularly beats the heart!
Your unenlightened doctor would see nothing in these sensations; and yet
you yourself perceive they are a part of health.--Did you remember your
cinchona this morning? Good. Cinchona also is a work of nature; it is,
after all, only the bark of a tree which we might gather for ourselves if
we lived in the locality.--What a world is this! Though a professed
atheist, I delight to bear my testimony to the world. Look at the
gratuitous remedies and pleasures that surround our path! The river runs
by the garden end, our bath, our fishpond, our natural system of
drainage. There is a well in the court which sends up sparkling water
from the earth's very heart, clean, cool, and, with a little wine, most
wholesome. The district is notorious for its salubrity; rheumatism is
the only prevalent complaint, and I myself have never had a touch of it.
I tell you--and my opinion is based upon the coldest, clearest processes
of reason--if I, if you, desired to leave this home of pleasures, it
would be the duty, it would be the privilege, of our best friend to
prevent us with a pistol bullet.'

One beautiful June day they sat upon the hill ou