"She doesn't believe in God," says some one. "Ah," says a mother standing by, "that's because she has no children." "Yes, she's got two." "Then," says the poor woman, "it's because they've never been ill." Here is little Antoinette and the old priest is holding her hand. She must be fifteen or sixteen years old by now, and she has not grown--or, at least, one has not noticed it. Father Piot, always white, gentle and murmurous, has shrunk a little; more and more he leans towards the tomb. Both of them proceed in tiny steps. "They're going to cure her, it seems. They're seeing to it seriously." "Yes--the extraordinary secret remedy they say they're going to try." "No, it's not that now. It's the new doctor who's come to live here, and he says, they say, that he's going to see about it." "Poor little angel!" The almost blind child, whose Christian name alone one knows, and whose health is the object of so much solicitude, goes stiffly by, as if she were dumb also, and deaf to all the prayers that go on with her. After the service some one comes forward and begins to speak. He is an old man, an officer of the Legion of Honor; his voice is weak but his face noble. He speaks of the Dead, whose day this is. He explains to us that we are not separated from them; not only by reason of the future life and our sacred creeds, but because our life on earth must be purely and simply a continuation of theirs. We must do as they did, and believe what they believed, else shall we fall into error and utopianism. We are all linked to each other and with the past; we are bound together by an entirety of traditions and precepts. Our normal destiny, so adequate to our nature, must be allowed to fulfill itself along the indicated path, without hearkening to the temptations of novelty, of hate, of envy--of envy above all, that social cancer, that enemy of the great civic virtue--Discipline. He ceases. The echo of the great magnificent words floats in the silence. Everybody does not understand all that has just been said; but all have a deep impression that the text is one of simplicity, of moderation, of obedience, and foreheads move altogether in the breath of the phrases like a field in the breeze. "Yes," says Crillon, pensively, "he speaks to confection, that gentleman. All that one thinks about, you can see it come out of his