ong my
botanical specimens and medical notes. Some day I shall be able to draw
up a wondrously interesting diagram. We shall see; we shall see!'

He was forgetting himself, carried away by his enthusiasm for science. A
glance at his nephew's cassock pulled him up short.

'As for you, you're a parson,' he muttered; 'you did well; a parson's a
very happy man. The calling absorbs you, eh? And so you've taken to the
good path. Well! you would never have been satisfied otherwise. Your
relatives, starting like you, have done a deal of evil, and still they
are unsatisfied. It's all logically perfect, my lad. A priest completes
the family. Besides, it was inevitable. Our blood was bound to run
to that. So much the better for you; you have had the most luck.'
Correcting himself, however, with a strange smile, he added: 'No, it's
your sister Desiree who has had the best luck of all.'

He whistled, whipped up his horse, and changed the conversation. The
gig, after climbing a somewhat steep slope, was threading its way
through desolate ravines; at last it reached a tableland, where the
hollow road skirted an interminable and lofty wall. Les Artaud had
disappeared; they found themselves in the heart of a desert.

'We are getting near, are we not?' asked the priest.

'This is the Paradou,' replied the doctor, pointing to the wall.
'Haven't you been this way before, then? We are not three miles from Les
Artaud. A splendid property it must have been, this Paradou. The park
wall this side alone is quite a mile and a half long. But for over a
hundred years it's all been running wild.'

'There are some fine trees,' observed the Abbe, as he looked up in
astonishment at the luxuriant mass of foliage which jutted over.

'Yes, that part is very fertile. In fact, the park is a regular forest
amidst the bare rocks which surround it. The Mascle, too, rises there; I
have heard four or five springs mentioned, I fancy.'

In short sentences, interspersed with irrelevant digressions, he then
related the story of the Paradou, according to the current legend of
the countryside. In the time of Louis XV., a great lord had erected
a magnificent palace there, with vast gardens, fountains, trickling
streams, and statues--a miniature Versailles hidden away among the
stones, under the full blaze of the southern sun. But he had there spent
but one season with a lady of bewitching beauty, who doubtless died
there, as none had ever seen her leave. Next y