[Illustration:  Story of an old man and an elder.]

One day a salad, the abstemious relish yielded by his garden herbs, was set on the table by Jeanneton.  At the first mouthful the good cure made a terrible face—­the salad tasted of lamp-oil.  The unhappy girl had filled a cruet with the sacred fluid.  From that day the bark closed and the flow ceased.

There is one of the best oil-stories you ever heard, and one of the most recent of attested miracles.  For my part, I am half sorry it is so well attested, and that I have the authority of that beadle in the blouse, who took my little two-franc piece with an expression of much intelligence.  I love the Legend.

[Illustration:  Merchandise in the temple.]

The environs of Paris are but chary of Legend.  I treasure this specimen, then, as if it had been a rare flower for my botany-box.

But the botany-box indeed, how heavy it was growing!  The umbrella, how awkward!  The sun, how vigorous and ardent!  Who ever supposed it could become so hot by half-past eight in the morning?

[Illustration:  Father Joliet.]

Certainly the ruthless box, which seemed to have taken root on my back, was heavier than it used to be.  Had its rotundity developed, like its master’s?  I stopped and gathered a flower, meaning to analyze it at my next resting-place.  I opened my box:  then indeed I perceived the secret of its weightiness.  It revealed three small rolls of oatmeal toasted, a little roast chicken, a bit of ham, some mustard in a cleaned-out inkstand!  This now was the treachery of Josephine.  Josephine, who never had the least sympathy for my botanical researches, and who had small comprehension of the nobler hungers and thirsts of the scientific soul, had taken it on her to convert my box into a portable meat-safe!

Bless the old meddler, how I thanked her for her treason!  The aspect of the chicken, in its blistered and varnished brown skin, reminded me that I was clamorously hungry.  Shade of Apicius! is it lawful for civilized mortals to be so hungry as I was at eight or nine in the morning?

At last I saw the end of that dusty, featureless street which stretches from the barrier to the extremity of Romainville.  I saw spreading before me a broad plain, a kind of desert, where, by carefully keeping my eyes straight ahead, I could avoid the sight of all houses, walls, human constructions whatever.

My favorite traveler, the celebrated Le Vaillant, to whom I am indebted for so many facts and data toward my great theory of Comparative Geography, says that in first reaching the solitudes of Caffraria he felt himself elated with an unknown joy.  No traced road was before him to dictate his pathway—­no city shaded him with its towers:  his fortune depended on his own unaided instincts.