latter he said:  ’You have been guilty of a great sin, not so much by your folly, for which God will forgive you, but in allowing one of the best of women to be sent to gaol.  An innocent woman has, by your misconduct, been treated for several days as a thief, and carried off to prison by gendarmes in the sight of the whole parish.  You owe her some sort of reparation.  On Sunday, the clerk’s wife will be seated as usual in the last row, near the church-door; at the Belief, you will go and fetch her and lead her by the hand to your seat of honour, which she is better worthy to occupy than you are.”

The poor creature did mechanically what she was bid, and she had ceased to be a sentient being.  From this time forth, little was ever seen of the flax-crusher and his family.  The manor had become, as it were, a tomb, from which issued no sign of life.

The clerk’s wife was the first to die.  The emotion had been too much for this simple soul.  She had never doubted the goodness of Providence, but the whole business had upset her, and she gradually grew weaker.  She was a saintly woman, with the most exquisite sentiment of devotion for the Church.  This would scarcely be understood now in Paris, where the church, as a building, goes for so little.  One Saturday evening, she felt her end approaching, and her joy was great.  She sent for the priest, her mind full of a long-cherished project, which was that during high mass on Sunday her body should be laid upon the trestles which are used for the coffins.  It would be joy indeed to hear mass once again, even in death, to listen to those words of consolation and those hymns of salvation; to be present there beneath the funeral pall, amid the assembled congregation, the family which she had so dearly loved, to hear them all, herself unseen, while all their thoughts and prayers were for her, to hold communion once again with these pious souls before being laid in the earth.  Her prayer was granted, and the priest pronounced a very edifying discourse over her grave.

“The old man lived on for several years, dying inch by inch, secluded in his house, and never conversing with the priest.  He attended church, but did not occupy his front seat.  He was so strong that his agony lasted eight or ten years.

“His walks were confined to the avenue of tall lime-trees which skirted the manor.  While pacing up and down there one day, he saw something strange upon the horizon.  It was the tricolour flag floating from the steeple of Treguier; the Revolution of 1830 had just been effected.  When he learnt that the king was an exile, he saw only too well that he had been bearing his part in the closing scenes of a world.  The professional duty to which he had sacrificed everything ceased to have any object.  He did not regret having formed too high an idea of duty, and it never occurred to him that he might have grown rich as others had done; but he lost faith in all save God.  The Carlists of Treguier went about declaring that the new order of things would not last, and that the rightful king would soon return.  He only smiled at these foolish predictions, and died soon afterwards, assisted in his last moments by the priest, who expounded to him that beautiful passage in the burial service:  ’Be not like the heathen, who are without hope.’