Talbot watched him depart with some amusement. He had decided in his own mind that Charles's acquaintance with the other camp was purely imaginary, and guessed that he must somehow have learnt of the proposed removal and have played his part accordingly. This conduct was hardly straightforward but Talbot was compelled to admit that it was clever, and moreover it was useful to himself. Then Talbot began to supervise the labor of striking the tent and bestowing all the portable property on board the house-boat. William, Majendie and the Admiral worked willingly and in little more than an hour everything was ready.

Charles returned as the towing-rope was being affixed to the mast and he at once carried his deck-chair, a bottle of beer, and a glass up onto the roof, where he lighted a cigarette and made himself comfortable. The moorings were cast off; Majendie and the Admiral took the rope; William pushed the house-boat off with a long pole and so they started. Talbot, to whom had fallen the comparatively light task of managing the rudder, meditated on the fitness of things, as he watched the towers staggering along and William every now and then making mighty efforts to keep her nose out of the bank with the pole. Towing a house-boat is rather like towing a barn across a ploughed field, and he congratulated himself on the forethought which had enabled him to suggest so satisfactory a division of labor. Nevertheless he regretted that Charles should by nothing short of trickery have gained the right to be even more idle than himself, and in a moment of irritation caused by this reflection he shouted to the two unfortunates at the rope that unless they would put a little way on her he could not be expected to steer.

As if to point his observation the un

wieldly vessel at this moment defied all William's efforts with the pole and ran hard into a bed of rushes with the immediate effect of pulling the towers up very short. Recriminations ensued, and the rest of the slow and arduous journey was occupied by intermittent but heated argument, in which every one joined except Charles, who listened and watched in placid satisfaction. This was a further instalment of anticipatory revenge.

However everything ends and at last they reached the new camping-ground, which was situated in a creek on the left bank of the stream at the corner of a wood that ran down to the water. A few hundred yards above was the back-water, on the opposite bank, beside which the other party was now busily engaged in making itself at home. They moored the house-boat fast and then disposed the tent, built a new fire-place and generally arranged things as they had been at the old spot. Even Charles was magnanimous enough to drive in a few tent-pegs, after which he said that he would bathe, an idea that seemed good to the others too.

Soon after this Charles had a new experience, and he realized for the first time what exactly were the feelings of Tantalus in the fable. He had swum some distance down stream and was meditating return; indeed he was lazily treading water with his face towards the house-boat, when he saw something that caused him to cease all motion and sink unexpectedly. He saw in fact a figure hurrying across the plank from the house-boat with a Gladstone bag in its hand, and the suddenness of the spectacle sent him nearly to the bottom. He beat his way frantically up to the surface again just in time to catch another glimpse of his property as it vanished over the fence into the wood.

This it was that caused him to startle Majendie, who was floating peacefully a little higher up, by passing him at a racing stroke and clambering hurriedly onto the house-boat. It took no long time for him to throw on a few clothes Macmillan's Magazine.

and hasten in the direction taken by Talbot; but in a moderately thick wood five minutes' start is as good as half an hour's in the open and both Talbot and the Gladstone bag had vanished utterly.

In the rush of the quarrel between Church and State in France, one class seems to have been singularly ignored by both combatants.

Yet the curé of the country village is, all the same, the channel by which Rome reaches and teaches the majority of her children: and those children, peasants and poor men as they are, form the great bulk of the citizens of the State.

For hundreds of years, M. le Curé has been ubiquitous all over France. In the straggling, bleak village of the North, with its long, untidy street, its bare poplars always bowing to the wind, and its little church sending up its spire among the dull, shuttered houses behold M. le Curé, with his shabby soutane fluttering in the breeze, his square-toed shoes, and his honest face reddened with exercise and the cold, or, in the white, hot villages of the South, behold him, after the hour of déjeuner, pacing the sunny Place, where the children skip and the women gossip and knit, reading from his ragged breviary, or, it may be, meditating and basking pleasantly in the light and heat beneath what is surely the first and earliest of green cotton umbrellas.

When the present warfare is only a cold page of history, it may be that M. le Curé will still be the familiar figure, North, South, East and West, he is to-day: that his work and order,

which have survived Albigensianism, Protestantism, Rationalism, the fury of the Revolution, and the deeper danger of internal corruption, will outlive the scientific criticisms and the political juggleries of our own day: and that, when our new philosophies are old, and our boasted enlightenment is utter darkness to our children, M. le Curé will still be teaching the sublime and narrow faith with which for sixteen centuries he has comforted the tried and sorrowing souls of simple

men.

One of his order, who may perhaps be a type of others, lived, and was still living only a few months ago, in a certain Provençal village.

Laforge stands forty miles inland from the Mediterranean. At the head of a deep and narrow valley-so deep and narrow as to be almost a gorge— the village climbs up a perpendicular rock, and stands white and sharp against the blue, clear sky. There is no driving road into Laforge-no whip or curse of drivers would bring horses up such an ascent. From the sunny Place of the village one can see the diligence discharging its little cargo and few passengers on the road below --so far below that the equipage looks like a child's toy, and the rotund and portly driver is only a slim, black speck. Up the winding footpath, through the olive groves-the footpath

turns into a rough stone stairway as it nears the village-Laforge receives all it ever receives of necessaries and luxuries from the world below it. The nearest town, Saint-Manine, is five-andtwenty miles away, and is only a town to the dwellers in Laforge, to whom the Provençal cities of Aix and Marseilles are but grand, unapproachable names, to whom Paris is a remote and glittering El Dorado, and for whom foreign parts literally have no exist

ence.

M. le Curé lives in the little presbytère, which stands two minutes' walk from the village. Its ratable value is exactly five pounds a year. It contains four bare rooms, and has a little patch of mountain included in its property, wherein an English eye would see possibilities of a garden and a French eye has seen subsistence for a goat.

M. le Curé is about five-and-forty years old. He has a round, apple face, with a kind of innocent simplicity about it which it will keep till his death. But if he has no cleverness, he has a practical day-by-day commonsense much more useful. His father was a peasant of Laforge, who made a little money-only a very little-out of his olives, and on it sent his son, Baptiste, to the very small seminary in the very small town, five-and-twenty miles away. His flock do not like M. le Cure the worse because he has been brought up among them a peasant, as they are peasants, and has known, as they know, the pangs of hunger and the temptations of grinding poverty. The last he may even know now. It is certain that when he had nailed up in his sitting-room a rough crucifix, a bénitier, and a rude bookshelf (to hold the four books which are his whole library) and had arranged a bed, a table, two chairs, and the sparsest supply of kitchen materials, the presbytère was entirely

equipped, furnished, and complete. Monsieur's soutane is always dreadfully old and, it may be added, illbrushed. At the seminary, Baptiste was a clumsy and untidy boy, with a good deal of ink distributed over his person. There is a suggestion now in his appearance that there would still be a good deal of ink about it, if he had any use for a commodity in which Laforge deals rarely. When he is consulted on some knotty point-the knotty points, not of spiritual difficulties, Laforge being not much troubled with those, but of mundane, everyday affairs which are often brought to the presbytère-M. le Curé has a habit of drawing a not too clean forefinger over a chin which never seems to have been recently shaved, in honest consideration. His hat is gray and faded with southern dust and sunshine. It is true he has Annette-an old dame of the village, with short petticoats, aud her firm face a network of lines and wrinkles-to look after him. But it is Annette's business to keep clean M. le Curé's house-not M. le Curé; and to make soup for the inner man out of nothing and out of everything, as only a Frenchwoman can, instead of brushing the outer man into a neatness no one would appreciate.

Every morning, before the sun has climbed over the mountains, and when Laforge lies fresh and cold in the thin air of the dawn, he hurries up the stone steps of the dark, passage-like street to the height where his little church of Sainte Marthe de Laforge stands sentinel over her children. He has seldom time to turn and look at the majestic ranges of mountains with the sunrise turning their snows to fire; or at the village and the olive groves, hanging, as it seems, on the rock above the black, winding line of the valley. To appreciate beauty, one must have known ugliness; as to deplore ugliness, one must have known beauty. If M.

le Curé is a little dull to the stately splendors among which he was born, he is fortunately also a little dull to the artistic imperfections of his church, having never seen a better. He goes in, softly. That the altar hangings are ragged and the Madouna tawdry; that the candles the faithful have offered to the saints have always guttered untidily, and that the mountain flowers in the mean vases in the side chapel are always dead, does not strike him to-day, or any day. The atmosphere is a little stale and thick, with yesterday's incense and humanity, after the light, clear air without.

Presently, a few of the faithful push aside the heavy door and curtain, and begin their prayers. M. Baptiste-with a brown-skinned boy server, who looks as if he had forgotten even to shake himself since he got out of bed-goes through the Mass, perfunctorily, the stranger might think--wonderfully little perfunctorily he should think, when he remembers that M. le Curé says the same form of words day after day, week after week, month after month, year in and year out. The congregation are not strictly attentive. But, with the awakening noises of the steep street calling them to the toil by which they can just, and only just, earn the bunch of gray bread, the handful of olives, and the red sour wine, which is all their subsistence, the wonder is that they are there at all.

After the service two women wait to speak to M. le Curé. One is only a girl, but her hard life has made her look already a middle-aged woman. She has to arrange about the baptism of her baby. The other, weeping, has to tell of the death of her son, who is not only the child of her infirm old age, but its breadwinner too. M. le Curé looks down a little ruefully at his ancient soutane. It has been long a dream of his to replace it with a new one, from the fees for burials and

christenings. But how can he take such fees from people like this? The new soutane will always be a dream, it seems. The women leave; and then, M. Baptiste having appointed the hour, not because it suits him, for he is still fasting and might well be tired, but because it suits his flock, hears confessions.

It is very seldom, outside the cover of an English novel, that the disclosures of M. le Curé's confessional are in the least thrilling or melodramatic. It is generally M. Baptiste's fate at least to listen to the infant peccadilloes of the little girls from the Laforge pensionnat, and to the spites and jealousies of a few old crones. Sometimes, but more rarely, Jacques Bonhomme owns his coarse, plain sins; or the slipping from the businesslike thriftiness and cunning which is the French peasant's pride, to the dishonestly sharp practice which is his special temptation. M. le Curé's counsels are, it may be, hardly spiritual; but they are at least practicable. For here the priest is, literally very often, brother to the penitent; living a like life under like conditions. So that when Jacques rises from his knees, there, but for the grace of God, goes M. le Curé.

Presently, mincing a little in her walk, with the feeble, narrow face which is the result of her petty life (for if heaven makes young faces, old people make their own out of their habits and character), comes Mademoiselle Angèle. She is the spinster ladyparamount of Laforge; a rentière though the rentes are meagre indeed, with a bonne-à-tout-faire, and memories of better days and of a tiresome uncle who was a bishop. Poor M. Baptiste's hand rasps, perplexed, over his chin when he sees her. She subscribes to his charities. She asks him to déjeuner. But as, in England, good ladies join working parties not so much to provide the heathen with clothes as them

selves with an interest, so Mademoiselle Angèle is everlastingly confessing sins, not to be rid of them, but for the excitement of the confession. It needs some sleek, subtle Abbé of a town to deal with the artificial difficulties of a soul like this. Good Baptiste is far too straightforward and simple. When Mademoiselle has gone away, with a flutter of prim skirts, he takes a long breath, puts some keys in his pocket, and goes out into the flooding sunshine and light with a sense of distasteful duty well through, and something false and complicated left behind.

It is time for his déjeuner-and past it. A good authority has said that the besetting sin of the French curé is his love of good eating. Baptiste's figure certainly inclines to the comfortable. But, in his case, there are not only the frequent and faithfully kept fasts of his Church, but the fact of his being literally "passing rich on forty pounds a year," which prevents much indulgence of the flesh. His déjeuner is, in fact, so scanty that only the capable Annette could make it look like a déjeuner at all. But the gray bread is freshly baked and the thin soup hot. M. Baptiste would be less well fed it he were an Euglish curate, three times as well paid, spending half a dozen times as much on his feeding, in the land which has been well described as that where one eats, but never dines. When the meal is over, he feels in the pockets of his soutane for his one small cherished luxury-snuff. They are empty. He remembers that Pierre, the diligence driver, is to bring him a little packet from Saint-Manine to-day; and goes out into the Place, whither Pierre always climbs to take his glass of red wine at the rough table outside the meau auberge--superbly named the Hôtel de France.

It is to be observed that M. le Curé never indulges in any kind of sport,

and has absolutely no exercise but walking. The game of billiards in the café-the simple and frequent recreation of other Frenchmen-his office forbids him. His newspaper-it is the one newspaper Baptiste, anyhow, ever sees-is a halfpenny rag containing the local lies only. But he has, at least, sunshine, warmth, light, and the loveliness of some of the most noble and exquisite scenery in the world. If man has been meagre to him, God and Nature have dealt him some of their best gifts abundantly. Then, too, the people on the Place are nearly all his friends-and are all his spiritual children. The narrow bitterness of the division of sects does not trouble his ministrations. Such religion as the people have, is wholly Baptiste's religion. It is as a friend that every one greets him now as he comes on to the Plave-the patron of the Hôtel de France standing in his doorway, the girl leaning on the stone wall watching for the diligence, the children skipping. the old woman passing through with a great basket of faggots on her stately head, and Jacques leading his donkey, with a barrel of wine on the beast's patient back.

M. le Curé, half-sitting on the wall, reads his breviary-a special office for one of those special days which occur so constantly in the Roman calendarwith the sun dancing and dazzling on the well-thumbed page, for it is the sun of early November and very brilliant and hot. He has but just put away the breviary and begun to enjoy himself with the local rag when, every one else being out of earshot, the girl leaning on the parapet approaches him timidly. Mariotte has seen a ghost! The apparition came that way, and went this, and did thus, and meant-it may be, can M. le Curé tell?-something sinister and terrible! Baptiste looks down the valley-where the diligence can be espied in the distance-and thinks a