"Lord God, Lord God, who hast wrought so many miracles by the little black St. John of Kortzeroth, if thou wouldst permit even a single ray of reason to enter the heads of Monseigneur and his friends, I believe it would be more beautiful than the tears of the little saint! And that other one on his island, with his clear eyes like the sparrow-hawk who pretends to sleep as he watches the unconscious geese in a pool,--O Lord, a few strokes of his wing and he is upon them, the birds may escape, while we shall have all Europe at our heels again!" He said all this very gravely, and I looked at Catherine to know whether I should laugh or cry. Suddenly he sat down, saying: "Come! Joseph, this is not at all cheerful, but what can we do? It is time to be at work. Look, and see what is the matter with Mr. Jacob's watch." Catherine took off the cloth, and each one went to his work. IX It was winter. Rain fell constantly, mingled with snow. There were no gutters, and the wind blew the rain as it fell from the tiles quite into the middle of the street. We could hear it pattering all day while Catherine was running about, watching the fire, and lifting the covers of the saucepans, and sometimes singing quietly to herself as she sat down to her spinning. Father Goulden and I were so accustomed to this kind of life that we worked on without thinking. We troubled ourselves about nothing, the table was laid and the dinner served exactly on the stroke of noon. At night Mr. Goulden went out after supper to read the gazette at Hoffman's, with his old cloak wrapped closely round his shoulders and his big fox-skin cap pulled down over his neck. But in spite of that, often when he came in at ten o'clock, after we had gone to bed, we heard him cough; he had dampened his feet. Then Catherine would say, "He is coughing again, he thinks he is as young as he was at twenty," and in the morning she did not hesitate to reproach him. "Monsieur Goulden," she would say, "you are not reasonable; you have an ugly cold, and yet you go out every evening." "Ah! my child, what would you have? I have got the habit of reading the gazette, and it is stronger than I. I want to know what Benjamin Constant and the rest of them say, it is like a second life to me and I often think 'they ought to have spoken further of such or such a thing. If Melchior Goulden had been there he would have opposed this or that, and it would not have failed to produce a great effect.'" Then he would laugh and shake his head and say: "Every one thinks he has more wit and good sense than the others, but Benjamin Constant always pleases me." We could say nothing more, his desire to read the gazette was so great. One day Catherine said to him: