Three times I called: 

“Solange!  Solange!  Solange!”

At the third time she opened her eyes and looked at me.  Tears trickled down her cheeks; then a moist glow darted from her eyes, as if the soul were passing, and the eyes closed, never to open again.

I sprang to my feet a raving maniac, I wanted to fly; I knocked against the table; it fell.  The candle was extinguished; the head rolled upon the floor, and I fell prostrate, as if a terrible fever had stricken me down—­an icy-shudder convulsed me, and, with a deep sigh, I swooned.

The following morning at six the grave-diggers found me, cold as the flagstones on which I lay.

Solange, betrayed by her father’s letter, had been arrested the same day, condemned, and executed.

The head that had called me, the eyes that had looked at me, were the head, the eyes, of Solange!

THE BIRDS IN THE LETTER-BOX

BY RENE BAZIN

Nothing can describe the peace that surrounded the country parsonage.  The parish was small, moderately honest, prosperous, and was used to the old priest, who had ruled it for thirty years.  The town ended at the parsonage, and there began meadows which sloped down to the river and were filled in summer with the perfume of flowers and all the music of the earth.  Behind the great house a kitchen-garden encroached on the meadow.  The first ray of the sun was for it, and so was the last.  Here the cherries ripened in May, and the currants often earlier, and a week before Assumption, usually, you could not pass within a hundred feet without breathing among the hedges the heavy odor of the melons.

But you must not think that the abbe of St. Philemon was a gourmand.  He had reached the age when appetite is only a memory.  His shoulders were bent, his face was wrinkled, he had two little gray eyes, one of which could not see any longer, and he was so deaf in one ear that if you happened to be on that side you just had to get round on the other.

Mercy, no! he did not eat all the fruits in his orchard.  The boys got their share—­and a big share—­but the biggest share, by all odds, was eaten by the birds—­the blackbirds, who lived there very comfortably all the year, and sang in return the best they could; the orioles, pretty birds of passage, who helped them in summer, and the sparrows, and the warblers of every variety; and the tomtits, swarms of them, with feathers as thick as your fingers, and they hung on the branches and pecked at a grape or scratched a pear—­veritable little beasts of prey, whose only “thank you” was a shrill cry like a saw.

Even to them, old age had made the abbe of St. Philemon indulgent.  “The beasts cannot correct their faults,” he used to say; “if I got angry at them for not changing I’d have to get angry with a good many of my parishioners!”

And he contented himself with clapping his hands together loud when he went into his orchard, so he should not see too much stealing.