s daughter. The
gentleman took off his hat, put on a smoking cap, and began to visit the
church with as much carelessness of demeanor as though it were a
provincial museum. The young lady dipped the tips of her fingers in the
holy water, sped through a short prayer, and hastened to rejoin her
father, with whom she began to chat and laugh.

When they came in front of the crib, the father adjusted his
eye-glasses, the daughter took her opera-glass, and for a few minutes
they gazed on this scene, new to them.

After gazing a little while, the gentleman shrugged his shoulders and
asked:

"What are all those dolls?"

"Papa," replied the daughter, "that is the Stable of Bethlehem, and a
simple representation of the birth of Jesus Christ."

"Simple?" exclaimed the father, "you're indulgent to-day, Azemia; you
should say grotesque and buffoonish; that it should be possible to push
bad taste so far! It is not enough that their mysteries are
incomprehensible; here they're trying to make them ridiculous!"

"Goodness, papa," said the young lady; "just think! for the common
people and peasants"--

"I tell you, Azemia, that it is absurd and shocking, and that the
peasants and the natives themselves must laugh at it. Let us go! I feel
myself catching cold here, and dinner must be ready."

They had hardly left the church, when a lady entered with a charming
four-year-old baby. The child ran to the crib where the mother joined
him after a prayer which seemed to me less summary and more serious than
that which the young lady had said.

"Oh! mamma," the child said half aloud; "look at the little Jesus, and
the Blessed Virgin, and St. Joseph. See the kings and the shepherds. Oh!
mamma, see the star the kings followed and that stopped over the Stable
of Bethlehem."

And the child stood on tip-toe and looked with wide-open eyes.

"Mamma," he went on, "see the ass and the ox that were in the stable
when the little Jesus came into the world. Oh! the beautiful gray ass!
and that ox that is all red; it looks like an ox for sure, like those in
the fields. Say, little mother, could I throw a kiss to little Jesus?"

And the child, putting his finger-tips to his lips, made a delightfully
naive salute.

The mother silently kissed her child, and it seemed to me that she was
weeping.

"Now, darling," she said, "now that you've seen everything, say to the
little Jesus the prayer you say every night before going to bed."

The child se