Leaping in among the timid
children, he made the thing really a game. The boys played like boys,
the men almost like madmen, and all with a delightful glee which became
contagious, first in the clerical body, and then among the spectators.
The aged Dean of the Chapter, Protonotary of his Holiness, held up his
purple skirt a little higher, and stepping from the ranks with an
amazing levity, as if suddenly relieved of his burden of eighty years,
tossed the ball with his foot to the venerable capitular Homilist,
equal to the occasion. And then, unable to stand inactive any longer,
the laity carried on the game among themselves, with shouts of not too
boisterous amusement; the sport continuing till the flight of the ball
could no longer be traced along the dusky aisles.

Though the home of his childhood was but a humble one--one of those
little cliff-houses cut out in the low chalky hillside, such as are
[59] still to be found with inhabitants in certain districts of
France--there were some who connected his birth with the story of a
beautiful country girl, who, about eighteen years before, had been
taken from her own people, not unwillingly, for the pleasure of the
Count of Auxerre. She had wished indeed to see the great lord, who had
sought her privately, in the glory of his own house; but, terrified by
the strange splendours of her new abode and manner of life, and the
anger of the true wife, she had fled suddenly from the place during the
confusion of a violent storm, and in her flight given birth prematurely
to a child. The child, a singularly fair one, was found alive, but the
mother dead, by lightning-stroke as it seemed, not far from her lord's
chamber-door, under the shelter of a ruined ivy-clad tower.

Denys himself certainly was a joyous lad enough. At the cliff-side
cottage, nestling actually beneath the vineyards, he came to be an
unrivalled gardener, and, grown to manhood, brought his produce to
market, keeping a stall in the great cathedral square for the sale of
melons and pomegranates, all manner of seeds and flowers (omnia
speciosa camporum), honey also, wax tapers, sweetmeats hot from the
frying-pan, rough home-made pots and pans from the little pottery in
the wood, loaves baked by the aged woman in whose house he lived. On
that Easter Day he had entered the [60] great church for the first
time, for the purpose of seeing the game.

And from the very first, the women who saw him at his business, o