an ignorant man, but you ask me what I think, and I must tell you. Very well, there are moments, on Sundays in the fine weather, when, lying in the sun, on this earth that feels, and seems to return the beating of my heart, pressing handsful of grass in my hands, my face buried in the mallows and trefoils of this little enclosure, with the murmuring of these thousands of insects in my ears, with the breath of this crowd of small, almost invisible, flowers of the spring among the mosses, on my cheeks, I feel shudderings of life and death over my whole body, as if God had really touched me with the end of one of his sun's rays; as if my father, mother, sisters, all those I loved, came to life again, and gasped under the grass, in the earth, and recognized me, and drew me towards them. Oh! who would not love a piece of ground where he had deposited his treasure, and which keeps it for him for the resurrection? A large tear rolled down his cheek, without his perceiving it. I saw that there was a love within this love; some especial worship and hope in this universal and pious worship of the creation. I. But, loving as you are, Claude, does not this solitude— without wife, children, or neighbours on these heights, where the wind only rises with you, does it not make you melancholy? He. No, sir, quite the contrary, I am melancholy when I am below; I become gay and happy when I come up again. Men make too much noise for my weak spirit, which only understands itself in silence; their noise drives away God from me; it seems to me that I am less in his company when I am in the villages. I verily believe that the good God loves the mountains best. I. However, he also made the plains and the valleys. I. But is there not, Claude, another reason that you do not tell me, and which makes you live alone here with your goats and sheep, and makes you travel two leagues in going down and two leagues in returning every day to come back to your ancient habitation. He (rising and looking at the grassy graves). It is true, sir; but do not let us speak of that, it would give you pain, and me also. The sun has quite gone down behind the mountain that is darkened by your woods. You will only have time to reach them before the black night comes over the valley. I. I forgot it as I talked to you. Claude, when we have discovered a good spring in the shade, as we walk through these solitudes, we sometimes forget more than time would have had us forget. I have done so to-day. I forgive you for having left my work; forgive me in your turn for having disturbed your Sunday's rest. I will come again, from time to time, if my coming does not trouble you, to talk with you of God, and even to pray to him with you, in your language, Claude. For I am very far from living in perpetual communion with him, like you; still farther from keeping a sanctuary for him in my soul so pure and clear of earthly vanities as that which he has prepared for himself in your solitude and repose. My soul rushes forward upon the waves of an agitated and noisy life; all that rushes, foams: but under the foam on the surface of my life, I have, like the hollows in the rocks at the bottom of your ravine, kept some drops of clear water in my soul, in which I love to be able to preserve the reflection of one corner of the sky, and to contemplate, like you, the floating clouds of God. I do not serve him with all my strength like you; still I love him, and pray to him with all my heart and all my mind. Sometimes I even sing hymns to him. But my song is not of equal value with yours, Claude; my hymns are words that fill the ear; yours are deeds that serve men. I am only worthy to converse with you because I have always felt an appreciation of souls, which are the habitation of a divine simplicity and virtue. Farewell, then, but only till we meet again, when chance or the chase may bring me back to Les Huttes. I went out of the enclosure, he accompanying me to the end of the ruined village. His dog, his sheep, his goats, and the rabbits even, followed him as if he had called them. These tame animals appeared to make a group around him, and to understand his love for them. I should not have been surprised to see him followed by the bees and insects. This man would have trained the rocks and trees. He, and all nature, animate and inanimate, soomed to understand, to E live with, and to love one another, in pious and mysterious intelligence, at the feet of their God. CHAPTER V. I. I DESCENDED the mountain in a state of peaceful thought, like that which I used to carry away with me in my youth when I left my mother in the garden, after hearing her utter her pious meditations on God, aloud, with her little children. I still heard in my soul the words, so simple, yet so full of divine meaning, of that poor disciple of solitude. Even the sound of his voice rang in my ears like the sound of the bells in the elevated villages of the Alps, which vibrate above the mists of the valley, and the sole function of which is to awaken thoughts of God in the souls of the inhabitants, the sursum corda of the woodcutters, mowers, and shepherds of the mountains. I felt better, warmer at heart, and more inclined towards goodness, simply by having been for a few moments near that shepherd's hearth, hidden behind the rocks and bushes. Every man has an atmosphere that surrounds him, and spreads around him good or evil influences, genial warmth or ice, according as his soul is more or less inclined heavenwards, and reflects more or less of the divinity within him. Repulsion and attraction result solely from the power of this atmosphere of men upon us. Some attract us like the magnet, others repel us like the serpent, without our knowing why. But nature, she knows it; we ought to listen to these repulsions and attractions, as sensations and warnings of the instinct of the soul. Attraction almost always reveals hidden virtue; repulsion, some vice concealed within the beings who inspire it in us. Souls have their physiognomies as well as faces. We do not analyze them, we feel them. Who has not said, while drawing near certain men, "I feel myself better near him?" II. I restrained my impatience to see Claude again, and to converse with him once more, during the whole week, in the fear of disturbing him in his work on any of the days of labour, and so hindering the good deeds toward his neighbour, with which he filled up his days. But when Sunday came, I went up again to Les Huttes, so to speak, instinctively, and found Claude in the same place where I had left him. Only, this time, he was not asleep in the sun, in the midst of his flowery grass. He had mowed the thin crop on the green sward during the week, and was raking the dry and scented hay together into small cocks, which he meant to carry under the shelter of his hut, at his leisure, to feed his animals in the winter. As there had been a heavy dew in the morning, he feared some violent rains might fall towards evening or next day, and therefore had heaped up his harvest of hay, that it might not be washed away. He seemed to see me again with pleasure. I deposited my shooting-coat on a stone, and helped him to finish his work, as if I had been a haymaker by trade. He made no attempts to prevent me. Before noon all the hay was in cock here and there on the shaven slope of the little meadow. He offered me a piece of his rye bread and one of his little goats'-milk cheeses, the relishing food of the peasant throughout our mountains. I shared this bread of my infancy with him with a sensation of pleasure. Our meal, moistened with ice-cold water from the spring, drawn up in a gourd, and the juice of some precocious cherries that had been blighted, and had fallen from the tree before their time, gave rise to a feeling of familiarity between us. When people have eaten and drank together, they are associated in fellowship, according to the language and manners of the country. We sat down under one of the haycocks, the top of which gave a little shade to our heads, and resumed the conversation of the previous Sunday. III. I. You have not told me, Claude, why this hamlet of Les Huttes, of which you are now the sole inhabitant, was thus abandoned to briars and ivy; and why all the men, women, and children disappeared, as water rushes out of a sluice when a storm carries away the dam, leaving the fish dead in the dry sand at the bottom. Neither have you told me who anciently rolled these great rough stones round this little retired spot of earth, built this cross, composed of three blocks, and raised the five or six turfy mounds that you do not mow like the rest, and that so closely resemble the tombs in the cemetery of Saint Point, that I see grow green under my window? He. What would you have me tell you, sir? The earth speaks plainly herself. Where the ridge of a furrow is seen, it is easy to know that there have been an ear of corn and a red poppy, is it not? Where sepulchres are to be seen, it is easy to know that there have been men and women. This enclosure was formerly the cemetery of Les Huttes. It had been selected, because it is the only spot in the mountain where the soil is deep enough to cover a coffin. It was seldom that a grave was dug in it, for there were only three houses in the hamlet, which contained only one united family. Every ten or fifteen years, perhaps, they laid an old man or a child here. They cultivated the ground all around, respecting only the spot of earth where the last was buried, as the cradle stands by the bed in our cottages. I have often heard my grandfather tell how he saw the great cross built in his childhood, with those three stones, which thirty men of the present day could not place one on the other. They found the first standing as it does now in the earth, like the trunk of a chestnut-tree of a thousand years, without a head, that had been rent asunder by the wind at the spot where the branches grew. It is not known whether it is one of the bones of the earth that has pierced the skin, or if it is a fragment that fell from that summit, and buried its base in a deep hole made by its own weight. It suggested the idea of placing another across it, and then a shorter one above, to make a cross, which might be seen from afar above the snow by shepherds and hunters. They heaped up earth in the form of a road from the rocks you see there, to the top of the trunk of the cross. Then they brought the second stone to it, by making it slide along this artificial road, and the same with the third. Then they knocked down the mound that had served them for a scaffolding, and no one could understand afterwards how these three rocks, towering above the earth, had been raised, fixed, and held upright, like a cross standing alone. The dwellers in the valleys, my grandfather |