distinguished Monseigneur who, in French of the
time of Bossuet, told exactly how these young minds should understand
the wisdom of Solomon, told it with a magisterial style which suggested
that Solomon lived long ago--and, yet, was one of the pillars of the
church. But what particularly interested me about the book, however, as
I turned over its yellow pages, was a tiny thing pressed between them, a
thing the Fathers and the Monseigneur would surely have regarded as
curiously alien to their wisdom, a thing once of a bright, but now of a
paler yellow, and of a frailer texture than it had once been in its
sunlit life--a flower, I thought at first, but, on looking closer, I saw
it was, or had once been, a yellow butterfly.

What young priest was it, I wondered, that had thus, with a breaking
heart, crushed the joy of life between these pages! On what spring
morning had this silent little messenger hovered a while over the high
garden-walls of St. Sulpice, flitting and fluttering, and at last darted
and alighted on the page of this old book, at that moment held in the
hands of a young priest walking to and fro amid the tall whispering
trees--delivering at last to him on the two small painted pages of its
wings a message he must not read....

The temptation was severe, for spring was calling all over Paris, and
the words of another book of the Great King whose wisdom he held in his
hand said to him in the Latin that came easily to all manner of men in
those days: _Lo! the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the
flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come,
and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.... Arise, my love, my
fair one, and come away._

The little fluttering thing seemed to be saying that to him as it poised
on the page, and, as his eyes went into a dream, began to crawl softly,
like a rope-walker, up one of his fingers, with a frail, half-frightened
hold, while, high up, over the walls of the garden the poplars were
discreetly swaying to the southern wind, and the lilac-bushes were
carelessly tossing this way and that their fragrance, as altar-boys
swing their censers in the hushed chancel,--but ah! so different an
incense.

_The flowers appear on the earth_, he repeated to himself, beguiled for
a moment, _the flowers appear on the earth; and the time of the singing
of birds is come...._

But, suddenly, for his help against that tiny yellow butterfly there
came to him