he gave the
rest of his time to profane but respectable amusements. He was of robust
temperament, with a tendency to corpulency, which he fought against by
taking considerable exercise; his face was round and good-natured, his
calm gray eyes reflected the tranquillity and uprightness of his soul,
and his genial nature was shown in his full smiling mouth, his thick,
wavy, gray hair, and his quick and cordial gestures.

When Julien was ushered into the presbytery, he found the cure installed
in a small room, which he used for working in, and which was littered
up with articles bearing a very distant connection to his pious calling:
nets for catching larks, hoops and other nets for fishing, stuffed
birds, and a collection of coleopterx. At the other end of the room
stood a dusty bookcase, containing about a hundred volumes, which seemed
to have been seldom consulted. The Abbe, sitting on a low chair in the
chimney-corner, his cassock raised to his knees, was busy melting glue
in an old earthen pot.

"Aha, good-day! Monsieur de Buxieres," said he in his rich, jovial
voice, "you have caught me in an occupation not very canonical; but
what of it? As Saint James says: 'The bow can not be always bent.' I am
preparing some lime-twigs, which I shall place in the Bois des Ronces
as soon as the snow is melted. I am not only a fisher of souls, but I
endeavor also to catch birds in my net, not so much for the purpose of
varying my diet, as of enriching my collection!"

"You have a great deal of spare time on your hands, then?" inquired
Julien, with some surprise.

"Well, yes--yes--quite a good deal. The parish is not very extensive,
as you have doubtless noticed; my parishioners are in the best possible
health, thank God! and they live to be very old. I have barely two or
three marriages in a year, and as many burials, so that, you see, one
must fill up one's time somehow to escape the sin of idleness. Every
man must have a hobby. Mine is ornithology; and yours, Monsieur de
Buxieres?"

Julien was tempted to reply: "Mine, for the moment, is ennui." He was
just in the mood to unburden himself to the cure as to the mental thirst
that was drying up his faculties, but a certain instinct warned him
that the Abbe was not a man to comprehend the subtle complexities of his
psychological condition, so he contented himself with replying, briefly:

"I read a great deal. I have, over there in the chateau, a pretty fair
collection of histo