together
by an entirety of traditions and precepts. Our normal destiny, so
adequate to our nature, must be allowed to fulfill itself along the
indicated path, without hearkening to the temptations of novelty, of
hate, of envy--of envy above all, that social cancer, that enemy of the
great civic virtue--Discipline.

He ceases. The echo of the great magnificent words floats in the
silence. Everybody does not understand all that has just been said;
but all have a deep impression that the text is one of simplicity, of
moderation, of obedience, and foreheads move altogether in the breath
of the phrases like a field in the breeze.

"Yes," says Crillon, pensively, "he speaks to confection, that
gentleman. All that one thinks about, you can see it come out of his
mouth. Common sense and reverence, we're attached to 'em by
something."

"We are attached to them by orderliness," says Joseph Boneas.

"The proof that it's the truth," Crillon urges, "is that it's in the
dissertions of everybody."

"To be sure!" says Benoit, going a bit farther, "since everybody says
it, and it's become a general repetition!"

The good old priest, in the center of an attentive circle, is
unstringing a few observations. "Er, hem," he says, "one should not
blaspheme. Ah, if there were not a good God, there would be many
things to say; but so long as there is a good God, all that happens is
adorable, as Monseigneur said. We shall make things better, certainly.
Poverty and public calamities and war, we shall change all that, we
shall set those things to rights, er, hem! But let us alone, above
all, and don't concern yourselves with it--you would spoil everything,
my children. _We_ shall do all that, but not immediately."

"Quite so, quite so," we say in chorus.

"Can we be happy all at once," the old man goes on; "change misery into
joy, and poverty into riches? Come now, it's not possible, and I'll
tell you why; if it had been as easy as all that, it would have been
done already, wouldn't it?"

The bells begin to ring. The four strokes of the hour are just falling
from the steeple which the rising mists touch already, though the
evening makes use of it last of all; and just then one would say that
the church is beginning to talk even while it is singing.

The important people get onto their horses or into their carriages and
go away--a cavalcade where uniforms gleam and gold glitters. We can
see the procession of the potentates