ng home from market in
the painted carts, which are doubtless of the pattern of the carts first
built there two hundred years ago. They were grateful for the immortal
old wooden, crooked and brown with the labor of the fields, who abounded
in these vehicles; when a huge girl jumped from the tail of her cart,
and showed the thick, clumsy ankles of a true peasant-maid, they could
only sigh out their unspeakable satisfaction.

Gardens embowered and perfumed the low cottages, through the open doors
of which they could see the exquisite neatness of the life within. One
of the doors opened into a school-house, where they beheld with rapture
the school-mistress, book in hand, and with a quaint cap on her gray
head, and encircled by her flock of little boys and girls.

By and by it began to rain again; and now while their driver stopped to
put up the top of the barouche, they entered a country church which had
taken their fancy, and walked up the aisle with the steps that blend
with silence rather than break it, while they heard only the soft
whisper of the shower without. There was no one there but themselves.
The urn of holy water seemed not to have been troubled that day, and
no penitent knelt at the shrine, before which twinkled so faintly one
lighted lamp. The white roof swelled into dim arches over their heads;
the pale day like a visible hush stole through the painted windows; they
heard themselves breathe as they crept from picture to picture.

A narrow door opened at the side of the high altar, and a slender young
priest appeared in a long black robe, and with shaven head. He, too as
he moved with noiseless feet, seemed a part of the silence; and when
he approached with dreamy black eyes fixed upon them, and bowed
courteously, it seemed impossible he should speak. But he spoke, the
pale young priest, the dark-robed tradition, the tonsured vision of an
age and a church that are passing.

"Do you understand French, monsieur?"

"A very little, monsieur."

"A very little is more than my English," he said, yet he politely went
the round of the pictures with them, and gave them the names of the
painters between his crossings at the different altars. At the high
altar there was a very fair Crucifixion; before this the priest bent one
knee. "Fine picture, fine altar, fine church," he said in English. At
last they stopped next the poor-box. As their coins clinked against
those within, he smiled serenely upon the good here