t seemed but yesterday, Sulpice
wandered again in thought to this quiet country spot, so loved by him,
so sweet, so still, reposing in the silence of provincial calm--far
away, removed from all the noise and bustle of Paris.

The farmers of Dauphine generally think of making their sons tillers of
the soil, sending them to school and to college, perhaps to begin later
the study of law or medicine, but welcoming them joyfully back again to
their native fields, to their farms, where the youths soon forget all
they may have learned of the Code or the Codex and lead the healthy,
hardy life of the country. Good, well-built fellows, their chests
enlarged by their daily exercise, their thighs strengthened by
mountain-climbing, gay young men, liking to hunt and drink on the banks
of the Isere and caring more for good harvests than for the songs of the
wind amongst the branches of the poplars upon the river-banks.

Sulpice had an old uncle on his father's side who proposed to his
sister-in-law to give up his broad acres--a fortune in themselves--to
Sulpice, if his nephew would consent to marry his daughter. Sulpice
refused. He would not marry for money.

"Fiddle-faddle!" cried his uncle. "Sickly sentimentality! If he
cultivates that _grain_, my brother's son will not make much headway."

"There is where you are mistaken, brother-in-law. What my poor Raymond
had not time to become, his child will be: a lawyer at once eloquent and
honest."

"Well, well," replied the uncle, "but he shall not have my girl."

Sulpice, after finishing his studies at Paris, returned to his mother at
Grenoble, took her away from the old house at Saint-Laurent and
installed her in the town with himself, where he began the practice of
law and attracted everybody's attention from the first. He made pleading
a sacred office and not a trade. Everyone was astonished that he had not
remained in Paris.

Why? He loved his native province, the banks of the Isere, the healthy,
poetic atmosphere hanging over the desert of the Chartreuse and the
snows of the Grand-Som. A talented man could make his way
anywhere,--moreover, it was his pleasure to consider it a duty not to
leave this secluded corner of the earth where he would cause freedom of
speech to be known. Sulpice, whose heart was open to every ardent and
generous manifestation of human thought, had imbibed from his mother, as
well as from his father's writings and books, and from the
_Encyclopaedia_ tha