poken to me of ambitious
darings and high exploits, she had been less exhorting me than giving
utterance to the bursting feelings of her own adventurous spirit.

Her outbreaks of impatience, her scarcely suppressed rebellion against
the dull ritual of our village life, her ill-disguised suspicion of
priestly influence, now rose before me; and I could see that the flame
which had burst forth at last, had been smouldering for many a year
within her. I could remember, too, the temper, little short of scorn, in
which she saw me devote myself to Jesuit readings, and labor hard at the
dry tasks the Sister Ursule had prescribed for me. And yet then all
my ambitions were of the highest and noblest. I could have braved
any dangers, or met any perils, in the career of a missionary! Labor,
endurance, suffering, martyrdom itself, had no terror for me. How was
it that this spirit did not touch her heart? Were all her sympathies
so bound up with the world that every success was valueless that won
no favor with mankind? Had she no test for nobility of soul save in
recognition of society? When I tried to answer these questions, I
suddenly bethought me of my own shortcomings. Where had this ambition
led me,--what were its fruits? Had I really pursued the proud path
I once tracked out for myself? or, worse thought again, had it no
existence whatever? Were devotion, piety, and single-heartedness nothing
but imposition, hypocrisy, and priestcraft? Were the bright examples
of missionary enterprise only cheats? were all the narratives of their
perilous existence but deception and falsehood? My latter experiences of
life had served little to exalt the world in my esteem. I had far more
frequently come into contact with corruption than with honesty. My
experiences were all those of fraud and treachery,--of such, too, from
men that the world reputed as honorable and high-minded. There was but
one step more, and that a narrow one, to include the priest in the same
category with the layman, and deem them all alike rotten and corrupted.
I must acknowledge that the Abbe himself gave no contradiction to this
unlucky theory. Artful and designing always, he scrupled at nothing to
attain an object, and could employ a casuistry to enforce his views far
more creditable to his craft than to his candor. I was no stranger to
the arts by which he thought to entrap myself. I saw him condescend to
habits and associates the very reverse of those he liked, in the