ed now. The priest had always had a love for animals
(and for ugly, common animals), which his pupil had by no means
shared. His room at the chateau had been little less than a menagerie.
He had even kept a glass beehive there, which communicated with a hole
in the window through which the bees flew in and out, and he would
stand for hours with his thumb in the breviary, watching the labours
of his pets. And this also had been his room! This dark, damp cell.
Here, breviary in hand, he had stood, and lain, and knelt. Here, in
this miserable prison, he had found something to love, and on which to
expend the rare intelligence and benevolence of his nature. Here,
finally, in the last hours of his life, he had written on the fly-leaf
of his prayer-book something to comfort his successor, and, "being
dead, yet spoke" the words of consolation which he had administered in
his lifetime. Monsieur the Viscount read that paper now with different
feelings.

There is, perhaps, no argument so strong, and no virtue that so
commands the respect of young men, as consistency. Monsieur the
Preceptor's lifelong counsel and example would have done less for his
pupil than was effected by the knowledge of his consistent career, now
that it was past. It was not the nobility of the priest's principles
that awoke in Monsieur the Viscount a desire to imitate his religious
example, but the fact that he had applied them to his own life, not
only in the time of wealth, but in the time of tribulation and in the
hour of death. All that high-strung piety--that life of prayer--those
unswerving admonitions to consider the vanity of earthly treasures,
and to prepare for death--which had sounded so unreal amidst the
perfumed elegances of the chateau, came back now with a reality gained
from experiment. The daily life of self-denial, the conversation
garnished from Scripture and from the Fathers, had not, after all,
been mere priestly affectations. In no symbolic manner, but literally,
he had "watched for the coming of his Lord," and "taken up the cross
daily;" and so, when the cross was laid on him, and when the voice
spoke which must speak to all, "The Master is come, and calleth for
thee," he bore the burden and obeyed the summons unmoved.

_Unmoved_!--this was the fact that struck deep into the heart of
Monsieur the Viscount, as he listened to Antoine's account of the
Cure's imprisonment. What had astonished and overpowered his own
undisciplined nature