ay without being able to learn anything
concerning the farmer or his sons; but the recollection of my adventure
remained deeply fixed in my memory.

"Ten years afterward I was travelling in the diligence through the
department of the Loiret; I was leaning from the window, and looking at
some coppice ground now for the first time brought under cultivation,
and the mode of clearing which one of my travelling companions was
explaining to me, when my eyes fell upon a walled inclosure, with an
iron-barred gate. Inside it I perceived a house with all the blinds
closed, and which I immediately recollected; it was the farmhouse where
I had been sheltered. I eagerly pointed it out to my companion, and
asked who lived in it.

"'Nobody just now,' replied he.

"'But was it not kept, some years ago, by a farmer and his two sons?'

"'The Turreaus;' said my travelling companion, looking at me; 'did you
know them?'

"'I saw them once.'

"He shook his head.

"'Yes, yes!' resumed he; 'for many years they lived there like wolves in
their den; they merely knew how to till land, kill game, and drink. The
father managed the house, but men living alone, without women to love
them, without children to soften them, and without God to make them
think of heaven, always turn into wild beasts, you see; so one morning
the eldest son, who had been drinking too much brandy, would not harness
the plow-horses; his father struck him with his whip, and the son, who
was mad drunk, shot him dead with his gun.'"

16th, P.M.--I have been thinking of the story of the old cashier these
two days; it came so opportunely upon the reflections my dream had
suggested to me.

Have I not an important lesson to learn from all this?

If our sensations have an incontestable influence upon our judgments,
how comes it that we are so little careful of those things which awaken
or modify these sensations? The external world is always reflected in us
as in a mirror, and fills our minds with pictures which, unconsciously
to ourselves, become the germs of our opinions and of our rules of
conduct. All the objects which surround us are then, in reality, so many
talismans whence good and evil influences are emitted, and it is for
us to choose them wisely, so as to create a healthy atmosphere for our
minds.

Feeling convinced of this truth, I set about making a survey of my
attic.

The first object on which my eyes rest is an old map of the history of
the principal