miniscences of those sunny days amongst the
mountains, the excursions to Grande Chartreuse, where the murmuring
brook trickled among the rocks, the halts at Guiers-Mort or under the
trees in the stillness of a drowsy day in summer; how delightful to
stretch one's self out at the foot of the cliffs or on a grassy slope
with a book, pausing now and then to indulge in day-dreams or glance up
at the fleecy clouds floating in the blue sky above his head and watch
them gathering, then vanishing and melting away like smoke wreaths! Ah!
how sweet were those long, idle days full of dreams, when the noise of
the waterfall dashing over the rocks lulled the senses like some merry
song, or a nurse's tender, crooning lullaby.

In those days Sulpice made no plans for his future, where he would go,
what he would do, or what would become of him; but he felt within
himself unbounded hope, a hope as limitless and bright as the azure sky
above him, the inspiration of devotion, love and poetry. He asked
himself whether he should be a missionary or a representative of the
people. It seemed to him that his heart was large enough to contain a
world, and as he grew up he began to ask himself the terrible question:
"Will a woman ever love me?"

To be loved! What a dream! One day he put this question to one of his
comrades at college, Guy de Lissac, the son of a country gentleman in
the neighborhood, who answered:

"Booby! every one is loved some day or other, and there are some who are
loved even too much!"

Sulpice had received a patriarchal and half-puritanical training, but
softened materially by his mother's almost excessive care, it had left,
as it were, a kind of poetic perfume that clung about him and never left
him.

Even during the days of his struggle in crowded Paris, in the heat of
political strife, his thoughts would fly back to the old home at
Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, recalling to mind the old armchair where his
father used to sit, the father whose kiss he had never known, hearing
again his mother's voice from the great oak staircase with its heavy
balusters, and he recalled at the same moment, the landscape with its
living figures, the spotted, steel-colored guinea-fowl screaming from
the branches of the elms, the vineyard hands returning from work, to
trample with bare feet the great clusters of grapes piled up in the
wine-vat in the cellar whose odor intoxicated! Even as a representative
or minister, musing over his past tha