a mark on his tomb with a feather from his own wing.
And he kissed the forehead of Lokman and made him rise from the dead,
and took him to the seventh heaven itself. And this is the history of
the angel. It all happened ages ago, and though the name of Lokman has
lived always through them, so has the shadow of the upas tree.

And this is the history of the world.

Only a child's goody-goody tale? Possibly. But for my part I know no
better philosophy and, at least as Nodier told it, not much better
literature.

[Sidenote: Minors.]

_Baptiste Montauban_ and _La Combe de l'Homme mort_ are, though scarcely
shorter than _Le Songe d'Or_, slighter. The first is a pathetic but not
quite consummate story of "love and madness" in a much better sense than
that in which Nodier's eccentric employer, Sir Herbert Croft, used the
words as his title for the history of Parson Hackman and Miss Ray.[86]
The second ("combe," the omission of which from the official French
dictionaries Nodier characteristically denounces, is our own "combe"--a
deep valley; from, I suppose, the Celtic Cwm; and pronounced by
Devonshire folk in a manner which no other Englishman, born east of the
line between the mouths of the Parret and the Axe, can master) is a
good but not supreme _diablerie_ of a not uncommon kind. _La Neuvaine de
la Chandeleur_ is longer, and from some points of view the most pathetic
of all. A young man, hearing some girls talk of a much-elaborated
ceremony like those of Hallowe'en in Scotland and of St. Agnes' Eve in
Keats, by which (in this case) _both_ sexes can see their fated lovers,
tries it, and discerns, in dream or vision, his ideal as well as his
fate. She turns out to be an actual girl whom he has never seen, but
whom both his father and her father--old friends--earnestly desire that
he should marry. He travels to her home, is enthusiastically greeted,
and finds her even more bewitching than her wraith or whatever it is to
be called. But she is evidently in bad health, and dies the same night
of aneurism. Not guested in the house, but trysted in the morning, he
goes there, and seeing preparations in the street for a funeral, asks of
some one, being only half alarmed, "_Qui est mort?_" The answer is,
"Mademoiselle Cecile Savernier."

Had these words terminated the story it would have been nearly perfect.
Two more pages of the luckless lover's progress to resignation from
despair and projected suicide seem to me to blunt the