nt figures were moving ghost-like about the church, while the
white-veiled throng before the altar gradually diminished until at last
it disappeared: fading from sight a little at a time, softly--as
dream-visions of things beautiful melt away.

* * * * *

Presently came the benediction: and all together we streamed out from
the brightness of the church into the wintry darkness--being by that
time well into Christmas morning, and the moon gone down. But when we
had left behind us the black streets of the little town, and were come
out into the open country, the star-haze sufficed to light us as we went
onward by the windings of the spectral white road: for the stars shine
very gloriously in Provence.

We elders kept together staidly, as became the gravity of our years; but
the young people--save two of them--frolicked on ahead and took again
with a will to singing noels; and from afar we heard through the
night-stillness, sweetly, other home-going companies singing these glad
Christmas songs. Lingering behind us, following slowly, came Esperit and
Magali--to whom that Christmas-tide had brought a life-time's happiness.
They did not join in the joy-songs, nor did I hear them talking. The
fullest love is still.

And peace and good-will were with us as we went along the white way
homeward beneath the Christmas morning stars.

SAINT-REMY-DE-PROVENCE,
_September, 1896._

A Feast-Day on the Rhone

I

This water feast-day was a part of the biennial pilgrimage to the
Sainte-Estelle of the Felibrige and the Cigaliers: the two Felibrien
societies maintained in Paris by the children of the South of France.
Through twenty-three dreary months those expatriated ones exist in the
chill North; in the blessed twenty-fourth month--always in burning
August, when the melons are luscious ripe and the grapes are ripening,
when the sun they love so well is blazing his best and the whole land is
a-quiver with a thrilling stimulating heat--they go joyously southward
upon an excursion which has for its climax the great Felibrien festival:
and then, in their own gloriously hot Midi, they really live!

By a semi-right and by a large courtesy, we of America were of this gay
party. Four years earlier, as the official representatives of an
American troubadour, we had come upon an embassy to the troubadours of
Provence; and such warm relations had sprung up between ourselves and
the poets to