ward the duties of daily
life than toward meditation or contemplative studies. The ideal did not
worry him in the least; and when he had said his mass, read his breviary,
confessed the devout sinners and visited the sick, he gave the rest of
his time to profane but respectable amusements. He was of robust
temperament, with a tendency to corpulency, which he fought against by
taking considerable exercise; his face was round and good-natured, his
calm gray eyes reflected the tranquillity and uprightness of his soul,
and his genial nature was shown in his full smiling mouth, his thick,
wavy, gray hair, and his quick and cordial gestures.

When Julien was ushered into the presbytery, he found the cure installed
in a small room, which he used for working in, and which was littered up
with articles bearing a very distant connection to his pious calling:
nets for catching larks, hoops and other nets for fishing, stuffed birds,
and a collection of coleopterx. At the other end of the room stood a
dusty bookcase, containing about a hundred volumes, which seemed to have
been seldom consulted. The Abbe, sitting on a low chair in the
chimney-corner, his cassock raised to his knees, was busy melting glue in
an old earthen pot.

"Aha, good-day! Monsieur de Buxieres," said he in his rich, jovial voice,
"you have caught me in an occupation not very canonical; but what of it?
As Saint James says: 'The bow can not be always bent.' I am preparing
some lime-twigs, which I shall place in the Bois des Ronces as soon as
the snow is melted. I am not only a fisher of souls, but I endeavor also
to catch birds in my net, not so much for the purpose of varying my diet,
as of enriching my collection!"

"You have a great deal of spare time on your hands, then?" inquired
Julien, with some surprise.

"Well, yes--yes--quite a good deal. The parish is not very extensive, as
you have doubtless noticed; my parishioners are in the best possible
health, thank God! and they live to be very old. I have barely two or
three marriages in a year, and as many burials, so that, you see, one
must fill up one's time somehow to escape the sin of idleness. Every man
must have a hobby. Mine is ornithology; and yours, Monsieur de Buxieres?"

Julien was tempted to reply: "Mine, for the moment, is ennui." He was
just in the mood to unburden himself to the cure as to the mental thirst
that was drying up his faculties, but a certain instinct warned him that
the Abbe was