I cannot help wondering, as I transcribe these notes, whether a Protestant born and bred is in a fit state to understand these signs, and do them what justice they deserve; and I cannot help answering that he is not.  They cannot look so merely ugly and mean to the faithful as they do to me.  I see that as clearly as a proposition in Euclid.  For these believers are neither weak nor wicked.  They can put up their tablet commanding Saint Joseph for his despatch, as if he were still a village carpenter; they can ‘recite the required dizaine,’ and metaphorically pocket the indulgence, as if they had done a job for Heaven; and then they can go out and look down unabashed upon this wonderful river flowing by, and up without confusion at the pin-point stars, which are themselves great worlds full of flowing rivers greater than the Oise.  I see it as plainly, I say, as a proposition in Euclid, that my Protestant mind has missed the point, and that there goes with these deformities some higher and more religious spirit than I dream.

I wonder if other people would make the same allowances for me!  Like the ladies of Creil, having recited my rosary of toleration, I look for my indulgence on the spot.

PRECY AND THE MARIONNETTES

We made Precy about sundown.  The plain is rich with tufts of poplar.  In a wide, luminous curve, the Oise lay under the hillside.  A faint mist began to rise and confound the different distances together.  There was not a sound audible but that of the sheep-bells in some meadows by the river, and the creaking of a cart down the long road that descends the hill.  The villas in their gardens, the shops along the street, all seemed to have been deserted the day before; and I felt inclined to walk discreetly as one feels in a silent forest.  All of a sudden, we came round a corner, and there, in a little green round the church, was a bevy of girls in Parisian costumes playing croquet.  Their laughter, and the hollow sound of ball and mallet, made a cheery stir in the neighbourhood; and the look of these slim figures, all corseted and ribboned, produced an answerable disturbance in our hearts.  We were within sniff of Paris, it seemed.  And here were females of our own species playing croquet, just as if Precy had been a place in real life, instead of a stage in the fairyland of travel.  For, to be frank, the peasant woman is scarcely to be counted as a woman at all, and after having passed by such a succession of people in petticoats digging and hoeing and making dinner, this company of coquettes under arms made quite a surprising feature in the landscape, and convinced us at once of being fallible males.