maidens over forty shake their heads and disparage them when they compare them with their reverend predecessor; while some very grave men in the parish look wise and suspect them to be heretics, without being able to prove it." Bernard de Rohan smiled; but, wishing to hear somewhat more of Father Willand's acquaintance with his friend Corse de Leon, he replied, "I thought that this same good priest you mention, if not a Savoyard by birth, had a Savoyard cure, and that the first of his penitents was our good friend Corse de Leon." "You are mistaken, my son," replied the ecclesiastic, "you are mistaken altogether. He has no cure in Savoy, though he may have business there; and as to Corse de Leon being a penitent, he is very impenitent indeed. I remember now," he continued, in a thoughtful way, "it is some five or six years since, when I was travelling through a little village called Pommieres, not far from the foot of Mount Rosa, that the people called me to confess a young man who had been crushed under an earth-slip of the mountain. It was difficult to get him to confess at all; and one priest from Saint Maurice had left him. But I set about the matter in a different way; told him I did not think he would die, and had great hopes of his not being damned if he did. He said he would rather die than not; but I argued him out of that, and in the end got him to make a full confession. What he did confess is no business of yours, my son; but I found him to be a man who had suffered many wrongs, and had endured bitter griefs; but one who was naturally as kind of heart as he was bold, fearless, and determined, and as noble and generous in his purposes as he was sometimes wild, fierce, and intemperate in their execution. I sat by his bedside for six weeks, for the three first of which he fluttered between life and death. At the end of that time he recovered, and his frame, like iron tempered in the fire, seemed to become but the stronger and more active for what it had undergone. Two or three years elapsed ere I met him again, and by that time he had become Corse de Leon. The cause of his quitting his native country, France, which was just before I first met with him, was that, on his return from the army, where he had served his king for years, he found his sister injured, insulted, and disgraced by the intendant of a high nobleman who was lately dead. He first sought for justice, but could not obtain it. He then visited the deathbed of the poor girl, and found her head supported by the daughter of that very high noble, and her lips moistened by the hand of--_Bernard de Rohan_. He turned away as soon as Death had done his work, and, mad for revenge, had sought the house of the intendant. But the generous spirit of two high youths, Bernard de Rohan and Henry de Brienne, had been beforehand with him, and had driven forth with ignominy the oppressor whom he sought. Still, however, the