of the first class!  Directly I knew it, I cried out, ‘My mother shall have coffee twice a day!’ And really, dear mother, there is nothing now to hinder you, as I shall now have a larger allowance to send you.

   “I include by begging you to take care of yourself if you wish to do
   me good; for nothing makes me feel so well as to think that you want
   for nothing.

   “Your son, from the bottom of my heart,

“Jacques.”

This is the answer that the portress dictated to me: 

“My good Jacquot:  It makes me very happy to see that your heart is still as true as ever, and that you will never shame those who have brought you up.  I need not tell you to take care of your life, because you know it is the same as my own, and that without you, dear child, I should wish for nothing but the grave; but we are not bound to live, while we are bound to do our duty.

“Do not fear for my health, good Jacques; I was never better!  I do not grow old at all, for fear of making you unhappy.  I want nothing, and I live like a lady.  I even had some money over this year, and as my drawers shut very badly, I put it into the savings’ bank, where I have opened an account in your name.  So, when you come back, you will find yourself with an income.  I have also furnished your chest with new linen, and I have knitted you three new sea-jackets.

“All your friends are well.  Your cousin is just dead, leaving his widow in difficulties.  I gave her your thirty francs’ remittance and said that you had sent it her; and the poor woman remembers you day and night in her prayers.  So, you see, I have put that money in another sort of savings’ bank; but there it is our hearts that get the interest.

   “Good-bye, dear Jacquot.  Write to me often, and always remember the
   good God, and your old mother,

“PHROSINE Millot.”

Good son, and worthy mother! how such examples bring us back to a love for the human race!  In a fit of fanciful misanthropy, we may envy the fate of the savage, and prefer that of the bird to such as he; but impartial observation soon does justice to such paradoxes.  We find, on examination, that in the mixed good and evil of human nature, the good so far abounds that we are not in the habit of noticing it, while the evil strikes us precisely on account of its being the exception.  If nothing is perfect, nothing is so bad as to be without its compensation or its remedy.  What spiritual riches are there in the midst of the evils of society! how much does the moral world redeem the material!