Sunday--the day of leisure and liberty--was spent in rambles and games with his comrades. It is the law of Geneva to shut the gates early in the evening, and they are not opened on any pretence for any one till the following morning. The lad, once or twice too late, was punished severely for his negligence. On the third occasion he resolved rather to run away than to encounter the menaced chastisement. His last act was to send for his cousin Bernard, to take leave of him: the boy did not press him to stay--did not offer to mediate for him; he returned to his parents, while Rousseau turned his steps from his native city--a vagrant and a beggar. No such aspect of things presented itself to the wanderer himself;--he was in his own eyes a hero in search of adventures;--he dreamt of all of brilliant and festive of which he had read in his romances, and while he slept under the roofs of peasants with whom he was acquainted, and who received him with cordial hospitality, his reveries pictured castles and enamoured damsels, a fortune the gift of love, and lasting happiness the effect. Rousseau was unfortunate at the outset. He had wandered about till he found himself at Confignon, in Savoy, a place two leagues distant from Geneva. He paid the curate, M. de Pontverre, a visit. His own account of his motives is suspicious: he says that he was anxious to see the descendant of men who figured in the history of the republic; that M. de Pontverre received him well, asked him to dinner, and invited him to be converted to the Roman catholic religion; and that he had not the heart to say nay to his kind entertainer. There is--and there was in those days still more--a great spirit of proselytism kept up among the priesthood of Savoy, hovering, as they do, close to a nest of heresy. Still, we cannot help imagining that the scheme was Rousseau's own, and that he presented himself as a willing convert--expecting thus to be made much of, and introduced in triumph to the houses of the catholic nobility. At any rate, M. de Pontverre behaved ill: he ought to have felt that it was more for the youth's permanent advantage to send him back to his friends, mediate for his pardon, and exhort him to regular and virtuous courses; and that to make a proselyte of him, and thus render his relations entirely hostile, and him an object of disgrace in his native city, while it opened no future career for earning an honest livelihood, was the worst step in the beginning of life that a young man could take. But M. de Pontverre, as a priest, thought differently;--if he did not invite the youth to abjure the religion of his country, he facilitated a scheme that sprang from any feeling rather than piety. Rousseau felt his pride fall, when his host told him that he would give him a letter to a charitable lady living at Annecy, who would forward his views. He saw, however, no other resource against starvation; and he yielded. Furnished by the curate with a letter, he set out--his head