ly as if his thought were a sneer.

II

The priest, after leaving the theatre, walked rapidly down Broadway past
the marble church, that had been shown on the stage, and still straight
on for two miles at the same rapid gait, past the quiet churchyards of
St. Paul's and Trinity into the comparative silence of Battery Park and
across to the sea wall. There he leaned for half an hour, reliving in
memory not only the years since his seven-year old feet had crossed this
threshold of the New World, but recalling something of his still earlier
childhood in his native France. The child's song had been an excitant to
the memory in recalling those first years in Auvergne.

"There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall."

How clearly he saw that! and his peasant father and mother as laborers
on or about it, and himself, a six-year old, tending the goats on that
same green hill or minding the geese in the meadows at its foot.

All this he saw as he gazed blankly at the dark waters of the bay, saw
clearly as if visioned in crystal. But of subsequent movings and
wanderings there was a blurred reflection only, till the vision
momentarily brightened, the outlines defined themselves again as he saw
his tired drowsy self put to bed in a tiny room that was filled with the
fragrance of newly baked bread. He remembered the awakening in that
small room over a bread-filled shop; it belonged to a distant
great-uncle baker on the mother's side, a personage in the family
because in trade. He could remember the time spent in that same shop and
the brick-walled, brick-floored, brick-ovened room behind it. He
recalled having stood for hours, it might have been days, he could not
remember--for then Time was forever and its passing of no moment--before
the deep ovens with a tiny blue-eyed slip of a girl. _P'tite Truite_,
Little Trout, they called her, the great-uncle baker's one grandchild.

And the shop--he remembered that, so light and bright and sweet and
clean, with people coming and going--men and women and children--and the
crisp yard-long loaves carried away in shallow baskets on many a fine
Norman head in the old seaport of Dieppe. And always the Little Trout
was by his side, even when the great-uncle placed him in one of the huge
flat-bottomed bread baskets and drew the two up and down in front of the
shop. Then all was dim again; so dim that except for the lap and
backward sucking of the waters against the sea wall,