I knew him by name, and knew something of the solitariness of his life, and I observed to him, “Jacques, you, at least, have a dull life of it; and you even now look weary with the long hours you have been spending alone.” “Alone!” he exclaimed, in a joyful tone, “I am never alone, and never weary. How should I be either, when my days are passed in the company of innocent animals, and time is given me to think of God!” The priest smiled even more approvingly than before; and I remarked to him, “We are here in Arcadia.” “But not without human sin,” said he, and pointing to a woman at a distance, who was in the employ of the farmer’s wife, he asked the latter how she could still have anything to do with a well-known thief. “Eh, father,” was the comment of a woman whom John Howard would have kissed, “starving her in idleness would not cure her of pilfering; and between working and being well-watched, she will soon leave her evil habits.” “You are a good Christian,” I said to her, “be you of what community you may.” “She is a good Catholic,” added the priest. “I am what the good God has made me,” was the simple reply of the Walloon wife; “and my religion is this to go on my knees when all the house is asleep, and then pray for the whole world.” “Ay, ay,” was the chorus of those around her, “that is true religion.” “It is a part of true religion,” interposed the priest; but I could not help thinking that he would have done as well had he left Marie Justine’s text without his comment. We walked together down to the bank of the river opposite the Chateau of the young Count de Levignon the proprietor and burgomaster of Houx. I looked up from the modern chateau to the ruins of the vast castle where the sons of Aymon once held barbaric state, maintained continual war, and affected a reverence for the mother of Him who was the Prince of Peace. The good priest seemed to guess my thoughts, for he remarked, “We live now in better times; the church is less splendid, and chivalry less ‘glorious,’ if not extinct; but there is a closer brotherhood of all men--at least,” he added hesitatingly--“at least I hope so.” “I can not remember,” said I, “a single virtue possessed by either Aymon or his sons, except brute courage, and a rude sort of generosity, not based on principle, but born of impulse. It is a pity that Belgium can not boast of more perfect chevaliers than the old proprietors of Poilvache, and that you have not a hero to match with Bayard.” “Belgium,” was his answer, “can make such boast, and had a hero who had finished his heroic career long before Bayard was born. Have you never heard of ‘the Good Knight without fear and without doubt’?” “I have heard of one without fear and without reproach.” “That title,” he remarked, “was but a plagiarism from that conferred on Jacques de Lelaing, by his contemporaries.” And then he sketched the outline of the good knight’s career, and directed me to sources where I might gather more detailed intelligence.