the priceless gift of youth which is theirs, and
sighs as he remembers that his own is gone?

Gone with its strength of hope—gone with
its belief in perfect happiness ever at hand but
never coming, quite—gone with its power of
enjoyment—gone with its sweet delusions—gone
with its sanguine trust.

        CHAPTER THE SEVENTH.

LET us follow our pedestrian as he rambles
on. The appetite of the melancholy Jacques
himself would have been appeased and satiated
by the gloom of a French suburb in general, and
by that of the main street of Belleville in
particular; yet it seems scarcely enough for him
whose footsteps we are at present following, for
he turns aside into a back lane, which ends in
the garlands of a cemetery. Late on a damp
and wintry afternoon he enters it, and wanders
among its paths alone. Alone? Not quite. A
cap upon the head of one deep down in a grave
which he is digging appears now and then
above the level of the ground, as he throws up
a shovelful of earth.

Is there no one else? Yes, far off in a path
among the graves a woman, dressed in mourning,
has stood motionless as a statue ever since our
wanderer entered the cemetery. She is standing
there still when he leaves it; and yet he leaves
it in no hurry; there is much there to attract
him. The place itself is attractive, with its
garden-like appearance—more flowers to be seen
than graves. What singular allegiance to the
dead appears too in these people whom we in
England call "our lively neighbours;" an
allegiance shown by garlands two days old placed
on graves whose occupants, the inscription tells
us, were lain there a dozen years ago. In one
waste place, too, heaps of these chaplets were
thrown, when blackened and decayed with age.
The decay of these tributes to decay was a
curious thing to observe. Little chapels, too,
were there built by "our lively neighbours"
over the bodies of some among the dead; little
chapels, but six or seven feet long, which yet
contain an altar covered with flowers, and a
prie-Dieu chair besides. What—a chair? Is
it possible that it is ever used? Is it possible
that there are those among "our lively neighbours"
who steal away from the noise and bustle
of the town, who seek this lonely place, and,
entering the chapel, beneath which lies the body
which they have loved, will sit and think awhile
about the dead, and lift a prayer—as their creed
allows—for him who has passed away.

Such things may be. It is a pleasant thought,
at any rate; for surely of all the ingredients
in the horror which death inspires, there is not
one that has a larger share to make it terrible
than the bitter thought that we are forgotten.
Oh, that exile of the body which we have loved!
Think of it in the bitter nights when the window
is lashed by driving rains—think then that
the form you loved, the face you have kissed,
the hands you have held, haply the grey hairs
you have reverenced, are there in that sodden
trench. They are there—that very face—those
very hands—your friend—your father—your
wife—your little child. Their bodies are not
removed out of the world—they are there—
lying this bitter night in the clay. Think of
this sometimes—not repiningly, not in hatred
at what must be, and what is right; think of
it, not rebelliously, not in despair, but think of
it—it is the dead man's right; and go, once,
now and then, and stand beside his grave. You
shall not come away the worse.

It may be that a long and solitary walk on a
winter's afternoon, through the streets of a
Parisian suburb, and an hour spent among the
garlands of a French cemetery, may be a good
way of getting the mind into a condition in
which it is profoundly touched by many small
incidents which would at other times go for
little or nothing, and in which it takes a powerful
interest in many things which it would pass
by unnoticed when in a stouter and more
vigorous mood.

It may be (and I incline to the opinion myself)
that this susceptibility to emotion, this ready
sympathy that costs us nothing, is very little
worth, and that the man whose heart is easily
penetrated by the sorrows of a blind man's dog
is hard of access to a poor relation. It may be
that such sensibility is but an enervating
mockery of real feeling—a worthless sham upon
the earth. It may be that the man who gives
a five-franc piece without inquiry, and perhaps
for the sake of a sensation, has debts at home,
which should in justice have closed his purse's
mouth. Alas! we know of one who, touched to
the quick by the sight of a dead jackass on the
road, could yet allow the mother that bore him
to want in her old age.

It may be, then, that the function of the
sentimental is hard to determine, and that it is not
easy to know whether upon the world's stage it
has a place at all—whether it is sterling coin
or counterfeit dross, the lawful property of the
dunghill.

Leaving this question an open one, let me go
on to say that it was in returning from the walk
which has just been described that my attention
was caught by a little crowd of children,
encompassing, and eagerly pressing around, some
grown-up person who stood in the midst of
them. On getting nearer to the group, I found
that this commotion was caused simply by the
breaking-up for the day of a girls' school of poor
children, and that it was the schoolmistress, a
sœur de charité, who for some reason had
accompanied the little things into the street, who
was thus hemmed in and surrounded by
these children of all conceivable ages and of
every possible size, to the number of about
thirty.

But that which pleased me most was, that
the sœur de charité had to stoop down and kiss
every one of the thirty girls before they could
be got to leave her. How eager, too, they were
—those behind pressing upon the foremost ones
in their desire to obtain the kiss with which this
kind and gentle lady dismissed them for the
night.