I was one of an ancient people, astray in foreign pastures--went
forth (even as the compromise was made at first by Christ and his
apostles with the magnificent but soulless worship of the Jews) to merge
these sounds of ancient rite and form in the deep roll of the organ,
that fills the churches where the Host is present.

I needed this abiding miracle to stay my faith--to give it a new
rapture, never experienced before--to sustain me in my sorrow. In the
presence of the holy Eucharist--in the sweet belief that saints communed
with me, and that the Mother of God, who, like me, had wept and
suffered, interceded for me at the throne of Christ, I regained the
vitality that seemed gone forever.

There is no cup like this for the lips of the parched and weary
wayfarer--none!

CHAPTER XV.

Let me go back a little in this retrospect, into which I am compelling
into a small space much that would take time in the telling, as a
necessary retrenchment for too much affluence of description in the
beginning.

The mind of the narrator, like the stone descending the shaft, gathers
accelerated velocity with its momentum toward the last, and so expends
itself in a more brief and sententious manner than in the commencement.
It should be also, but rarely is, more powerful, and more condensed as
it nears its _finale_.

Why these things do _not_ go more uniformly together, as according to
popular opinion they invariably must, is better understood by the artist
than his readers.

Details are requisite to fill up a mental picture, and impress it on the
memory, and, though brevity is certainly the soul of wit, it cannot be
said to be infallible in enforcing description to do its duty--that of
painting a panoramic picture on the brain.

Life is full of pre-Raphaelitism, and so is fiction, if indeed it
resembles life--such as we know it, or such as it might be. The art of
verisimilitude is found alone in detail.

Let me go back, then, for a brief summary of some of the principal
events and personages of Monfort Hall and Beauseincourt, the earlier
portions of this retrospect. I will begin with the La Vignes.

George Gaston, in one of the brief pauses of his stormy political
career, wooed and married Margaret La Vigne, the year before her mother
espoused in second nuptials her early lover (the brother of that saintly
minister who came to her rescue in the first days of her widowhood), and
in this marriage she has been happy a