a sylphide, which caused her to
say, "Go along!" in high delight. He had brought a letter to the priest,
from an old friend, and was to stay at the house.

Back across the brown fields we went. I was no longer alone; the world
was full of new light, new interest. I felt that it was good to be
alive; and when my companion began to sing in very lightness of heart, I
joined in, and sang with right good will.

"La bonne aventure, oh gai!
La bonne aventure!"

He told me that his mother always sang him this song when he had been a
good boy; I replied that mine had done the same. How many French
mothers have sung the merry little lilt, I wonder? We sang one snatch
and another, and I could not see that the marquise had had the advantage
of the little peasant girl, if it came to songs.

The marquis--but why should I keep to the empty title, which I was never
to use after that first hour? Nothing would do but that we should be
friends on the instant, and for life,--Jacques and Yvon. "Thus it was
two centuries ago," my companion declared, "thus shall it be now!" and
I, in my dream of wonderment and delight, was only too glad to have it
so.

We talked of a thousand things; or, to be precise, he talked, and I
listened. What had I to say that could interest him? But he was full of
the wonders of travel, the strangeness of the new world and the new
people. Niagara had shaken him to the soul, he told me; on the wings of
its thunder he had soared to the empyrean. How his fanciful turns of
expression come back to me as I write of him! He was proud of his
English, which was in general surprisingly good.

New York he did not like,--a savage in a Paris gown, with painted face;
but on Boston he looked with the eyes of a lover. What dignity! what
Puritan, what maiden grace of withdrawal! An American city, where one
feels oneself not a figure of chess, but a human being; where no street
resembles the one before it, and one can wander and be lost in
delicious windings! Ah! in Boston he could live, the life of a poet, of
a scholar.

"And then,--what, my friend? I come, I leave those joys, I come away
here, to--to the locality of jump-off, as you say,--and what do I find?
First, a pearl, a saint; for nobleness, a prince, for holiness, an
anchorite of Arabia,--Le Pere L'Homme-Dieu! Next, the ancient friend of
my house, who becomes on the instant mine also, the brother for whom I
have yearned. With these, the graves of