but the pride of his mother in her boy's progress! the joy over the
first English-French letter that went to the great-uncle baker; the
constant toil of both parents that the savings might be sufficient to
educate their one child--that the son might have what the parents
lacked. Already the mother had begun to speak of the priesthood: she
might yet see her son Jean a priest, a bishop, and archbishop. Who could
tell? America is America, and opportunities infinite--a cardinal,
perhaps, and the gift of a red hat from the Pope, and robes and laces!
There was no end to her ambitious dreaming.

But across the day-dreams fell the shadow of hard times: the shutting
down of the mills, the father's desperate illness in a workless winter,
his death in the early spring, followed shortly by that of the worn-out
and ill-nourished mother--and for the twelve-year-old boy the
abomination of desolation, and world and life seen dimly through tears.
Dim, too, from the like cause, that strange passage across the ocean to
Dieppe--his mother's uncle having sent for him to return--a weight as of
lead in his stomach, a fiery throbbing in his young heart, a sickening
craving for some expression of human love. The boyish tendrils, although
touched in truth by spring frosts, were outreaching still for some
object upon which to fasten; yet he shrank from human touch and sympathy
on that voyage in the steerage lest in his grief and loneliness he
scream aloud.

Dieppe again, and the Little Trout with her grandfather awaiting him on
the pier; the Little Trout's arms about his neck in loving welcome, the
boy's heart full to bursting and his eyelids reddened in his supreme
effort to keep back tears. Dependent, an orphan, and destined for the
priesthood--those were his life lines for the next ten years. And the
end? Revolt, rebellion, partial crime, acquittal under the law, but
condemnation before the tribunal of his conscience and his God.

There followed the longing to expiate, to expiate in that America where
he was not known but where he belonged, where his parents' dust mingled
with the soil; to flee to the Church as to a sanctuary of refuge, to be
priest through expiation. And this he had been for years while working
among the Canadian rivermen, among the lumbermen of Maine, sharing their
lives, their toil, their joys and sorrows, the common inheritance of the
Human. For years subsequent to his Canadian mission, and after his
naturalization as a