“Oh! oh!” said the priest, putting down the sacred vase on a stone at the corner of the bridge, “stop thou there without moving.”

Then he walked up to the robber, tipped him up, seized his loaded stick, and when the rascal got up to struggle with him, he gutted him with a blow well planted in the middle of his stomach.  Then he picked up the viaticum again, saying bravely to it:  “Ah!  If I had relied upon thy providence, we should have been lost.”  Now to utter these impious words on the road to Sacche was mere waste of breath, seeing that he addressed them not to God, but to the Archbishop of Tours, who have once severely rebuked him, threatened him with suspension, and admonished him before the Chapter for having publicly told certain lazy people that a good harvest was not due to the grace of God, but to skilled labour and hard work—­a doctrine which smelt of the fagot.  And indeed he was wrong, because the fruits of the earth have need both of one and the other; but he died in this heresy, for he could never understand how crops could come without digging, if God so willed it—­a doctrine that learned men have since proved to be true, by showing that formerly wheat grew very well without the aid of man.  I cannot leave this splendid model of a pastor without giving here one of the acts of his life, which proves with what fervour he imitated the saints in the division of their goods and mantles, which they gave formerly to the poor and the passers-by.  One day, returning from Tours, where he had been paying his respects to the official, mounted on his mule, he was nearing Azay.  On the way, just out side Ballan, he met a pretty girl on foot, and was grieved to see a woman travelling like a dog; the more so as she was visibly fatigued, and could scarcely raise one foot before the other.  He whistled to her softly, and the pretty wench turned round and stopped.  The good priest, who was too good a sportsman to frighten the birds, especially the hooded ones, begged her so gently to ride behind him on his mule, and in so polite a fashion, that the lass got up; not without making those little excuses and grimaces that they all make when one invites them to eat, or to take what they like.  The sheep paired off with the shepherd, the mule jogged along after the fashion of mules, while the girl slipped now this way now that, riding so uncomfortably that the priest pointed out to her, after leaving Ballan, that she had better hold on to him; and immediately my lady put her plump arms around the waist of her cavalier, in a modest and timorous manner.

“There, you don’t slip about now.  Are you comfortable?” said the vicar.

“Yes, I am comfortable.  Are you?”

“I?” said the priest, “I am better than that.”