in exercise by doing the hard work of a devoted servant. The keenest
observer could not have found a trace of the fine figure, the Rubens
coloring, the splendid lines, the superb teeth, the virginal eyes which
first drew the attention of the Abbe Niseron to the young girl. The
birth of her only daughter, Madame Soudry, Jr., had blighted her
complexion, decayed her teeth, dimmed her eyes, and even caused the
dropping of their lashes. It almost seemed as if the finger of God
had fallen upon the wife of the priest. Like all well-to-do country
house-wives, she liked to see her closets full of silk gowns, made and
unmade, and jewels and laces which did her no good and only excited the
sin of envy and a desire for her death in the minds of all the young
women who served Rigou. She was one of those beings, half-woman,
half-animal, who are born to live by instinct. This ex-beautiful Arsene
was disinterested; and the bequest left to her by the late Abbe Niseron
would be inexplicable were it not for the curious circumstance which
prompted it, and which we give here for the edification of the vast
tribe of expectant heirs.

Madame Niseron, the wife of the old republican sexton, always paid the
greatest attention to her husband's uncle, the priest of Blangy; the
forty or fifty thousand francs soon to be inherited from the old man
of seventy would put the family of his only nephew into a condition of
affluence which she impatiently awaited, for besides her only son (the
father of La Pechina) Madame Niseron had a charming little daughter,
lively and innocent,--one of those beings that seem perfected only
because they are to die, which she did at the age of fourteen from "pale
color," the popular name for chlorosis among the peasantry. The darling
of the parsonage, where the child fluttered about her great uncle the
abbe as she did in her home, bringing clouds and sunshine with her, she
grew to love Mademoiselle Arsene, the pretty servant whom the old abbe
engaged in 1789. Arsene was the niece of his housekeeper, whose place
the girl took by request of the latter on her deathbed.

In 1791, just about the time that the Abbe Niseron offered his house as
an asylum to Rigou and his brother Jean, the little girl played one of
her mischievous but innocent tricks. She was playing with Arsene and
some other children at a game which consists in hiding an object which
the rest seek, and crying out, "You burn!" or "You freeze!" according
as th