ottles. Still his gravity at once
returned to him on going in to lectures. He took notes on his knees,
while the professor, resting his hands on the edge of his desk, talked
away in familiar Latin, interspersed with an occasional word in French,
when he was at fault for a better. A discussion would then follow in
which the students argued in a strange jargon, with never a smile upon
their faces. Then, at ten o'clock, there came twenty minutes' reading
of Holy Writ. He fetched the Sacred Book, a volume richly bound and
gilt-edged. Having kissed it with especial reverence, he read it out
bare-headed, bowing every time he came upon the name of Jesus, Mary, or
Joseph. And with the arrival of the second meditation he was ready to
endure for love of God another and even longer spell of kneeling
than the first. He avoided resting on his heels for a second even.
He delighted in that examination of conscience which lasted for
three-quarters of an hour. He racked his memory for sins, and at times
even fancied himself damned for forgetting to kiss the pictures on his
scapular the night before, or for having gone to sleep upon his left
side--abominable faults which he would have willingly redeemed by
wearing out his knees till night; and yet happy faults, in that they
kept him busy, for without them he would have no occupation for his
unspotted heart, steeped in a life of purity.

He would return to the refectory, as if relieved of some great crime.
The seminarists on duty, wearing blue linen aprons, and having their
cassock sleeves tucked up, brought in the vermicelli soup, the boiled
beef cut into little squares, and the helps of roast mutton and French
beans. Then followed a terrific rattling of jaws, a gluttonous silence,
a desperate plying of forks, only broken by envious greedy glances at
the horseshoe table, where the heads of the seminary ate more delicate
meats and drank ruddier wines. And all the while above the hubbub some
strong-lunged peasant's son, with a thick voice and utter disregard for
punctuation, would hem and haw over the perusal of some letters from
missionaries, some episcopal pastoral, or some article from a religious
paper. To this he listened as he ate. Those polemical fragments, those
narratives of distant travels, surprised, nay, even frightened him, with
their revelations of bustling, boundless fields of action, of which
he had never dreamt, beyond the seminary walls. Eating was still in
progress when