minister,"--and to me the religious vocation seemed the very grandest
one. And those about me would smile and without doubt they thought,
inasmuch as I too wished it, that it was the best career for me.

In the evening, especially at night, I meditated constantly of that
hereafter which to pronounce the name of filled me with terror:
eternity. And my departure from this earth,--this earth which I had
scarcely seen, of which I had seen no more than the tiniest and most
colorless corner--seemed to me a thing very near at hand. With a
blending of impatience and mortal fear I thought of myself as soon to
be clothed in a resplendent white robe, as soon to be seated in a great
splendor of light among the multitude of angels and chosen ones around
the throne of the Blessed Lamb; I saw myself in the midst of a
great moving orb that, to the sound of music, oscillated slowly and
continuously in the infinite void of heaven.




CHAPTER XIV.



"Once upon a time a little girl when she opened a large fruit that had
come from the colonies, a big creature came out of it, a green creature,
and it bit her and that made her die."

It was my little friend Antoinette (she was six and I seven) who was
telling me the story which had been suggested to her because we were
about to break and divide an apricot between us. We were at the extreme