heir social circles, their
plans, their enjoyments. True, I am an old man now. But in other years
it was the same. All my life I have been in solitude.

To this there is a single exception--one star shining in the blackness.
And my career has been so bleak that, although it ended in deeper
sadness than I had known before, I look back to the epsiode with
gratitude. The bank of clouds which shut out this sole light of my life
quickened its brilliancy before they submerged it.

After the terrible siege of '71, when the last German was gone, and our
houses had breasted the ordeal of the Commune, I was sent to the South.
The Superior thought my cheeks were ominously hollow, and suspected
threats of consumption in my cough. So I was to go to the
Mediterranean, and try its milder air. I liked the change. Paris, with
its gloss of noisy gayety and its substance of sceptical heartlessness,
was repugnant to me. Perhaps it was because of this that Brother
Sebastian had been mured up in the capital two-thirds of his life. If
our surroundings are too congenial we neglect the work set before us.
But no matter; to the coast I went.

My new home was a long-established house, spacious, venerable, and
dreary. It was on the outskirts of an ancient town, which was of far
more importance before our Lord was born than it has ever been since.
We had little to do. There were nine brothers, a handful of resident
orphans, and some threescore pupils. Ragged, stupid, big-eyed urchins
they were, altogether different from the keen Paris boys. For that
matter, every feature of my new home was odd. The heat of the summer
was scorching in its intensity. The peasants were much more respectful
to our cloth, and, as to appearance, looked like figures from Murillo's
canvases. The foliage, the wine, the language, the manners of the
people--everything was changed. This interested me, and my morbidness
vanished. The Director was delighted with my improved condition. Poor
man! he was positive that my cheeks had puffed out perceptibly after
the first two months. So the winter came--a mild, wet, muggy winter,
wholly unlike my favorite sharp season in the North.

We were killing time in the library one afternoon, the Director and a
Swiss Brother sitting by the lamp reading, I standing at one of the
tall, narrow windows, drumming on the panes and dreaming. The view was
not an inspiring one. There was a long horizontal line of pale yellow
sky and another of flat