It was plain at a glance that his present was not of a piece with his past I could not place him. His manners were easy and agreeable, and yet he was not a gentleman. He was well informed, and evidently of some mental training, and yet he was not quite an educated man. After his first visit to me, with the cook, he, too, occasionally looked in upon me, generally late in the afternoon, when I could call the day's work done and could talk French for half an hour with him, in place of taking a walk. He was strongly dramatic, like Sorel, but in a different way. Sorel was intense; Carron was _théâtral_. He was very fond of declamation; and seeing from the first my wish to learn French,--which Sorel would never very definitely recognize,--he often recited to me, for ear practice, and in an exceedingly effective way, passages from the Old Testament. He seemed to know the Psalms by heart. He was a good deal of an actor, and he took the part of a Hebrew prophet with great effect. But his fervor was all stage fire, and he would turn in an instant from a denunciatory Psalm to a humorous story. Even his stories were of a religious cast, like those which ministers relate when they gather socially. He told me once about a priest who was strolling along the bank of the Loire, when a drunken sailor accosted him and reviled him as a lazy good-for-nothing, a _fainéant_, and slapped his face. The priest only turned the other cheek to him. “Strike again,” he said; and the sailor struck. “Now, my friend,” said the priest, “the Scripture tells us that when one strikes us we are to turn the other cheek. There it ends its instruction and leaves us to follow our own judgment.” Whereupon, being a powerful man, he collared the sailor and plunged him into the water. He told me, too, with great unction, and with a roguish gleam in his eye, a story of a small child who was directed to prepare herself for confession, and, being given a manual for self-examination, found the wrong places, and appeared with this array of sins: “I have been unfaithful to my marriage vows.... I have not made the tour of my diocese.”