"I have seen Justin Lebasset die, dear Arribas, and was touched, edified, to the bottom of my soul. God grant, when my hour comes, I may find that calm, that force, in the last struggle with life. Not a complaint! not a sigh! Once only he gave Norine a sorrowful, heartrending look; then, from lips already cold, breathed that one word, 'Theodore!' Marcus Aurelius used to say: 'A man should leave the world as a ripe olive falls from the tree that bore it, and with a kiss for the earth that nourished it.' Well! the peasant of Rocaillet had the beautiful, noble, simple death of the fruit of the earth, going to the common receptacle of all mortal beings, with no sense that he was torn away. Pardon, I pray, my quotation from Marcus Aurelius, who persecuted the Christians. I give it with the same respect with which you would quote some holy writer. Ah! my dear Arribas! not all the saints have received canonization." It is to the priestly character, in truth, that M. Fabre always comes back for tranquillizing [134] effect; and if his peasants have something akin to Wordsworth's, his priests may remind one of those solemn ecclesiastical heads familiar in the paintings and etchings of M. Alphonse Legros. The reader travelling in Italy, or Belgium perhaps, has doubtless visited one or more of those spacious sacristies, introduced to which for the inspection of some more than usually recherche work of art, one is presently dominated by their reverend quiet: simple people coming and going there, devout, or at least on devout business, with half-pitched voices, not without touches of kindly humour, in what seems to express like a picture the most genial side, midway between the altar and the home, of the ecclesiastical life. Just such interiors we seem to visit under the magic of M. Fabre's well-trained pen. He has a real power of taking one from Paris, or from London, to places and people certainly very different from either, to the satisfaction of those who seek in fiction an escape. 12th June 1889 IX. THE "CONTES" OF M. AUGUSTIN FILON TALES OF A HUNDRED YEARS SINCE ["CONTES DU CENTENAIRE." PAR AUGUSTIN FILON. PARIS: HACHETTE ET CIE. ]