but high spirited and grateful."

At this anecdote my mother broke out and said that such things ought
not to be told by a father to his wife and son, if he wanted to have
their respect.

M. Jerome Coignard, seeing her become red with anger, changed the
conversation with kindly meant ability. He addressed himself
abruptly to Friar Ange, who, hands in his sleeves, sat humbly at the
corner of the fireside:

"Little friar, what kind of relics did you carry on the second
vicar's donkey's back in company with Sister Catherine? Was it your
small clothes you gave the devotees to kiss, in the manner of some
grey friars, of whom Henry Estienne has narrated the adventures?"

"Ah! your reverence," meekly said Friar Ange with the expression of
a martyr suffering for truth, "it was not my small clothes, it was a
foot of St Eustache."

"I should have taken my oath on it, if it would not be a sin to do
so," exclaimed the priest, brandishing the drumstick of a fowl.
"Those Capuchins turn out saints utterly ignored by good authors,
who work on ecclesiastical history. Neither Tillemont nor Fleury
speak of that St Eustache to whom a church is consecrated, very
wrongly, at Paris, when so many saints recognised by writers well
deserving to be believed, are still waiting for a similar honour.
The 'Life of St Eustache' is a tissue of ridiculous fables; the same
is the case of that of St Catherine, who has never existed except in
the imagination of some wicked Byzantine monk. But I do not want to