ng down that
briefest of village names and seeing how it looks in print. But it may
be elongated at will, and yet be only improved. If you wish to be very
specific, you may call it Gy-les-Nonnains--Gy of the Little Nuns. I went
with my hostess, another morning, to call upon M. le Cure, who himself
opened his garden door to us (there was a crooked little black cross
perched upon it), and, lifting his rusty _calotte_, stood there a moment
in the sunshine, smiling a greeting more benignant than words.

A rural _presbytere_ is not a very sumptuous dwelling, and M. le Cure's
little drawing room reminded me of a Yankee parlor (_minus_ the
subscription books from Hartford, on the centre-table) in some
out-of-the-way corner of New England. But he took us into his very
diminutive garden, and showed us an ornament that would not have
flourished in the shade of a Yankee parlor--a rude stone image of the
Virgin, which he had become possessed of I know not how, and for which
he was building a sort of niche in the wall. The work was going on
slowly, for he must take the labor as he could get it; but he appealed
to his visitors, with a smile of indulgent irony, for an assurance that
his little structure would not make too bad a figure. One of them told
him that she would send him some white flowers to set out round his
statue; whereupon he clasped his hands together over his snuff-box and
expressed cheerful views of the world we live in. A couple of days
afterward he came to breakfast, and, of course, he arrived early, in his
new cassock and band. I found him in the billiard-room, walking up and
down alone, and reading his breviary. The combination of the locality,
the personage, and the occupation made me smile; and I smiled again
when, after breakfast, I found him walking up and down the garden,
puffing a cigarette. Of course he had an excellent appetite; but there
is something rather cruel in those alternations of diet to which the
French parish priest is subjected. At home he lives like a peasant--a
fact which, in itself, is not particularly cruel, inasmuch as he is
usually a peasant born. But his fellow peasants don't breakfast at the
chateau and gaze adown the savory vistas opened by cutlets a la
Soubise. They have not the acute pain of being turned back into the
stale atmosphere of bread and beans. Of course it is by no means every
day or every week even that M. le Cure breakfasts at the chateau; but
there must nevertheless be