The two guests looked at each other with a growing drollery on either face, and presently broke into a laugh.
"Ah!" said the doctor, as the three rose up, "you juz kip dad cog-an'-bull fo' yo' negs summon."
"I tell you," said Evariste, turning upon him with sudden gravity, "iv dad is troo, I tell you w'ad is sure-sure! Ursin Lemaitre din kyare nut'n fo' doze creed; _he fall in love_!"
Then, with a smile, turning to Jean Thompson, and back again to Père Jerome:
"But anny'ow you tell it in dad summon dad 'e kyare fo' dad creed."
Père Jerome sat up late that night, writing a letter. The remarkable effects upon a certain mind, effects which we shall presently find him attributing solely to the influences of surrounding nature, may find for some a more sufficient explanation in the fact that this letter was but one of a series, and that in the rover of doubted identity and incredible eccentricity Père Jerome had a regular correspondent.
About two months after the conversation just given, and therefore somewhere about the Christmas holidays of the year 1821, Père Jerome delighted the congregation of his little chapel with the announcement that he had appointed to preach a sermon in French on the following Sabbath--not there, but in the cathedral.
He was much beloved. Notwithstanding that among the clergy there were two or three who shook their heads and raised their eyebrows, and said he would be at least as orthodox if he did not make quite so much of the Bible and quite so little of the dogmas, yet "the common people heard him gladly." When told, one day, of the unfavorable whispers, he smiled a little and answered his informant,--whom he knew to be one of the whisperers himself,--laying a hand kindly upon his shoulder:
"Father Murphy,"--or whatever the name was,--"your words comfort me."
"Because--'_Væ quum benedixerint mihi homines_!'"
*[*"Woe unto me, when all men speak well of me!"]
The appointed morning, when it came, was one of those exquisite days in which there is such a universal harmony, that worship rises from the heart like a spring.
"Truly," said Père Jerome to the companion who was to assist him in the mass, "this is a Sabbath day which we do not have to make holy, but only to _keep_ so."