ed her with
wonderful patience and indulgence, and exhausted his ingenuity to make
her time pass more pleasantly. This was the first real effort he had made
to subdue his dislikes and his passive tendencies, and it had the good
effect of preparing him, by degrees, to face more serious trials, and to
take the initiative in matters of greater importance. He discovered that
the energy he expended in conquering a first difficulty gave him more
ability to conquer the second, and from that result he decided that the
will is like a muscle, which shrivels in inaction and is developed by
exercise; and he made up his mind to attack courageously the work before
him, although it had formerly appeared beyond his capabilities.

He now rose always at daybreak. Gaitered like a huntsman, and escorted by
Montagnard, who had taken a great liking to him, he would proceed to the
forest, visit the cuttings, hire fresh workmen, familiarize himself with
the woodsmen, interest himself in their labors, their joys and their
sorrows; then, when evening came, he was quite astonished to find himself
less weary, less isolated, and eating with considerable appetite the
supper prepared for him by Manette. Since he had been traversing the
forest, not as a stranger or a person of leisure, but with the
predetermination to accomplish some useful work, he had learned to
appreciate its beauties. The charms of nature and the living creatures
around no longer inspired him with the defiant scorn which he had imbibed
from his early solitary life and his priestly education; he now viewed
them with pleasure and interest. In proportion, as his sympathies
expanded and his mind became more virile, the exterior world presented a
more attractive appearance to him.

While this work of transformation was going on within him, he was aided
and sustained by the ever dear and ever present image of Reine Vincart.
The trenches, filled with dead leaves, the rows of beech-trees, stripped
of their foliage by the rude breath of winter, the odor peculiar to
underwood during the dead season, all recalled to his mind the
impressions he had received while in company with the woodland queen. Now
that, he could better understand the young girl's adoration of the
marvellous forest world, he sought out, with loving interest, the sites
where she had gone into ecstasy, the details of the landscape which she
had pointed out to him the year before, and had made him admire. The
beauty of the