"Very well," said Pierrette, laughing, "that will be a fortune which will not make him too vain." A little while afterwards, when they were alone, the conversation was recommenced, but they proceeded regularly about the business, and, finally, debated the question as to how the will should be drawn, according to law, so as to leave Muiceron to the child. The difficulty was that Ragaud knew very little about writing in any shape, and Pierrette nothing at all. They talked away, without making any progress, far into the night, and at last acknowledged they would have to finish where they should have begun, namely, by going next day to consult Master Perdreau, the notary of Val-Saint, on the subject. Thereupon, they went off well pleased to sleep in their big bed, with the canopy of yellow serge; and as the next morning the work of the thatching pressed, on account of the rains which were about to commence, Ragaud postponed his trip to another day. Now, the good God, who has his own designs, permitted that it should be entirely otherwise from what these good people had intended, and in a manner so astonishing that no one, no matter how wise, could have foreseen it; for La Ragaude, who had nearly completed her forty-second year, became the following year the mother of a beautiful little girl, who was most fondly welcomed by the delighted parents. TO BE CONTINUED. PHILOSOPHICAL TERMINOLOGY.[67] II. TO THE EDITOR OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD: In the letter which I ventured to address to you a short time ago concerning the general conditions required in a good English work of philosophy, I made some observations on the importance and difficulty of wielding the popular language in a strictly philosophical manner. As I apprehend that the title of "Philosophical Terminology," under which that letter was made to appear, is scarcely justified by its very limited contents, I beg leave to add a few other considerations on the same subject, that your intelligent readers may find in these additional remarks a confirmation and a further development of what I said about our need of a more copious philosophical language. There are two words which cannot easily be dispensed with in the metaphysical analysis of created beings; these two words are, in Latin, _actus_ and _potentia_. Metaphysicians, in fact, conclusively prove that in every created substance there are two essential principles: a principle of activity, which is known under the name of _actus_, and a principle of passivity, which is styled _potentia_. These two terms, which are so necessary in metaphysics, and so familiar to all the scholastic philosophers, might be fairly represented in English by "act" and "potency"; though as yet neither "act" nor "potency" is popularly used in this philosophical sense.