“No fear of that; it is not nice enough!”

The abbe went hastily through the garden, the house, the court planted with asparagus, till he came to the wall which separated the parsonage from the public road, and there he carefully opened the letter-box, in which there would have been room enough for all the mail received in a year by all the inhabitants of the village.

Sure enough, he was not mistaken.  The shape of the nest, like a pine-cone, its color and texture, and the lining, which showed through, made him smile.  He heard the hiss of the brooding bird inside and replied: 

“Rest easy, little one, I know you.  Twenty-one days to hatch your eggs and three weeks to raise your family; that is what you want?  You shall have it.  I’ll take away the key.”

He did take away the key, and when he had finished the morning’s duties—­visits to his parishioners who were ill or in trouble; instructions to a boy who was to pick him out some fruit at the village:  a climb up the steeple because a storm had loosened some stones, he remembered the tomtit and began to be afraid she would be troubled by the arrival of a letter while she was hatching her eggs.

The fear was almost groundless, because the people of St. Philemon did not receive any more letters than they sent.  The postman had little to do on his rounds but to eat soup at one house, to have a drink at another and, once in a long while, to leave a letter from some conscript, or a bill for taxes at some distant farm.  Nevertheless, since St. Robert’s Day was near, which, as you know, conies on the 29th of April, the abbe thought it wise to write to the only three friends worthy of that name, whom death had left him, a layman and two priests:  “My friend, do not congratulate me on my saint’s day this year, if you please.  It would inconvenience me to receive a letter at this time.  Later I shall explain, and you will appreciate my reasons.”

They thought that his eye was worse and did not write.

The abbe of St. Philemon was delighted.  For three weeks he never entered his gate one time without thinking of the eggs, speckled with pink, that were lying in the letter-box, and when the twenty-first day came round he bent down and listened with his ear close to the slit of the box.  Then he stood up beaming: 

“I hear them chirp, Philomene; I hear them chirp.  They owe their lives to me, sure enough, and they’ll not be the ones to regret it any more than I.”

He had in his bosom the heart of a child that had never grown old.

Now, at the same time, in the green room of the palace, at the chief town of the department, the bishop was deliberating over the appointments to be made with his regular councillors, his two grand vicars, the dean of the chapter, the secretary-general of the palace, and the director of the great academy.  After he had appointed several vicars and priests he made this suggestion: