hat children just able to walk tottered up to him, and held
familiarly by the skirts of his black gown, whenever his clear blue eyes
rested on theirs, while he beckoned them to his side. No one would ever
have guessed from the countenance of Father Paul what deadly perils he
had confronted, but for the scar of a saber-wound, as yet hardly healed,
which ran across his forehead. That wound had been dealt while he was
kneeling before the altar in the last church in Brittany which had
escaped spoliation. He would have died where he knelt, but for the
peasants who were praying with him, and who, unarmed as they were, threw
themselves like tigers on the soldiery, and at awful sacrifice of their
own lives saved the life of their priest. There was not a man now on
board the ship who would have hesitated, had the occasion called for it
again, to have rescued him in the same way.

The service began. Since the days when the primitive Christians
worshiped amid the caverns of the earth, can any service be imagined
nobler in itself, or sublimer in the circumstances surrounding it, than
that which was now offered up? Here was no artificial pomp, no gaudy
profusion of ornament, no attendant grandeur of man's creation. All
around this church spread the hushed and awful majesty of the tranquil
sea. The roof of this cathedral was the immeasurable heaven, the pure
moon its one great light, the countless glories of the stars its only
adornment. Here were no hired singers or rich priest-princes; no curious
sight-seers, or careless lovers of sweet sounds. This congregation and
they who had gathered it together, were all poor alike, all persecuted
alike, all worshiping alike, to the overthrow of their worldly
interests, and at the imminent peril of their lives. How brightly and
tenderly the moonlight shone upon the altar and the people before
it! how solemnly and divinely the deep harmonies, as they chanted the
penitential Psalms, mingled with the hoarse singing of the freshening
night breeze in the rigging of the ship! how sweetly the still rushing
murmur of many voices, as they uttered the responses together, now died
away, and now rose again softly into the mysterious night!

Of all the members of the congregation--young or old--there was but one
over whom that impressive service exercised no influence of consolation
or of peace; that one was Gabriel. Often, throughout the day, his
reproaching conscience had spoken within him again and agai