WORKS CORRESPONDING TO WORDS

There are three thousand souls of them. Mon Dieu! it is like a little republic.

　　Neither judge nor bailiff is known there.

　　The mayor does everything.

　　He allots the imposts, taxes each person conscientiously, judges quarrels for nothing, divides inheritances without charge, pronounces sentences gratuitously; and he is obeyed, because he is a just man among simple men." To villages where he found no schoolmaster, he quoted once more the people of Queyras:

　　"Do you know how they manage?" he said.

　　"Since a little country of a dozen or fifteen hearths cannot always support a teacher, they have school-masters who are paid by the whole valley, who make the round of the villages, spending a week in this one, ten days in that, and instruct them.

　　These teachers go to the fairs. I have seen them there.

　　They are to be recognized by the quill pens which they wear in the cord of their hat.

　　Those who teach reading only have one pen; those who teach reading and reckoning have two pens; those who teach reading, reckoning, and Latin have three pens.

　　But what a disgrace to be ignorant!

　　Do like the people of Queyras!"

　　Thus he discoursed gravely and paternally; in default of examples, he invented parables, going directly to the point, with few phrases and many images, which characteristic formed the real eloquence of Jesus Christ.

　　And being convinced himself, he was persuasive.

BOOK FIRST--A JUST MAN

CHAPTER IV

　　WORKS CORRESPONDING TO WORDS

　　 His conversation was gay and affable.

　　He put himself on a level with the two old women who had passed their lives beside him. When he laughed, it was the laugh of a schoolboy.

　　Madame Magloire liked to call him Your Grace [Votre Grandeur]. One day he rose from his arm-chair, and went to his library in search of a book. This book was on one of the upper shelves.

　　As the bishop was rather short of stature, he could not reach it.

　　"Madame Magloire," said he, "fetch me a chair.

　　My greatness [grandeur] does not reach as far as that shelf."

　　One of his distant relatives, Madame la Comtesse de Lo, rarely allowed an opportunity to escape of enumerating, in his presence, what she designated as "the expectations" of her three sons. She had numerous relatives, who were very old and near to death, and of whom her sons were the natural heirs.

　　The youngest of the three was to receive from a grand-aunt a good hundred thousand livres of income; the second was the heir by entail to the title of the Duke, his uncle; the eldest was to succeed to the peerage of his grandfather.

　　The Bishop was accustomed to listen in silence to these innocent and pardonable maternal boasts.

　　On one occasion, however, he appeared to be more thoughtful than usual, while Madame de Lo was relating once again the details of all these inheritances and all these "expectations."

　　She interrupted herself impatiently: "Mon Dieu, cousin!