re easy and agreeable, and
yet he was not a gentleman. He was well informed, and evidently of some
mental training, and yet he was not quite an educated man. After his
first visit to me, with the cook, he, too, occasionally looked in upon
me, generally late in the afternoon, when I could call the day's work
done and could talk French for half an hour with him, in place of taking
a walk. He was strongly dramatic, like Sorel, but in a different
way. Sorel was intense; Carron was _theatral_. He was very fond of
declamation; and seeing from the first my wish to learn French,--which
Sorel would never very definitely recognize,--he often recited to me,
for ear practice, and in an exceedingly effective way, passages from the
Old Testament. He seemed to know the Psalms by heart. He was a good deal
of an actor, and he took the part of a Hebrew prophet with great effect.
But his fervor was all stage fire, and he would turn in an instant from
a denunciatory Psalm to a humorous story. Even his stories were of
a religious cast, like those which ministers relate when they gather
socially. He told me once about a priest who was strolling along the
bank of the Loire, when a drunken sailor accosted him and reviled him as
a lazy good-for-nothing, a _faineant_, and slapped his face. The priest
only turned the other cheek to him. "Strike again," he said; and the
sailor struck. "Now, my friend," said the priest, "the Scripture tells
us that when one strikes us we are to turn the other cheek. There
it ends its instruction and leaves us to follow our own judgment."
Whereupon, being a powerful man, he collared the sailor and plunged him
into the water. He told me, too, with great unction, and with a roguish
gleam in his eye, a story of a small child who was directed to prepare
herself for confession, and, being given a manual for self-examination,
found the wrong places, and appeared with this array of sins: "I have
been unfaithful to my marriage vows.... I have not made the tour of my
diocese."

Carron had an Irish wife (_une Irlandaise_), much younger than he, whom
he worshipped. He told me, one day, about his courtship. When he first
met her, she knew not a word of French, and he not a word of English.
He was greatly captivated (epris), and he had to contrive some mode of
communication. They were both Catholics. He had a prayer-book with Latin
and French in parallel columns; she had a similar prayer-book but in
Latin and English. They would