away the basket, ran across the garden, leaped over the wall like a tiger, and fled.

XII.

THE BISHOP AT WORK.

THE next day at sunrise, Monseigneur Bienvenu, was walking in the garden. Madame Magloire ran towards him quite beside herself.

"Monseigneur, Monseigneur," cried she, "does your greatness know where the silver basket is ?"

"Yes," said the Bishop.

"God be praised!" said she, "I did not know what had become of it."

The Bishop had just found the basket on a flower-bed. He gave it to Madame Magloire and said: "There it is." "Yes," said she, "but there is nothing in it. The silver?" "Ah," said the Bishop, "it is the silver then that troubles you. I do not know where that is."

"Good heavens! it is stolen. That man who came last night stole it."

And in the twinkling of an eye, with all the agility of which her age was capable, Madame Magloire ran to the oratory, went into the alcove, and came back to the Bishop. The Bishop was bending with some sadness over a cochlearia des Guillons which the basket had broken in falling. He looked up at Madame Magloire's cry:

"Monseigneur, the man has gone! the silver is stolen!" While she was uttering this exclamation her eyes fell on an angle of the garden where she saw traces of an escalade. A capstone of the wall had been thrown down.

"See, there is where he got out; he jumped into Cochefilet lane. The abominable fellow, he has stolen our silver !"

The Bishop was silent for a moment, then raising his serious eyes, he said mildly to Madame Magloire :

"Now first, did this silver belong to us?"

Madame Magloire did not answer; after a moment the Bishop continued:

"Madame Magloire: I have for & long time wrongfully withheld this silver; it belonged to the poor. Who was this man ?. A poor man evidently."

"Alas! Alas!" returned Madame Magloire. "It is not on my account or Mademoiselle's; it is all the same to us. But it is on yours, Monseigneur. What is Monseigneur going to eat from now?"

The Bishop looked at her with amazement: "How so! have we no tin plates?"

Madame Magloire shrugged her shoulders. "Tin smells."

"Well, then, iron plates."

Madame Magloire made an expressive gesture.

"Iron tastes."

"Well," said the Bishop, "then, wooden plates."

In a few minutes he was breakfasting at the same table at which Jean Valjean sat the night before. While breakfasting, Monseigneur Bienvenu pleasantly remarked to his sister who said nothing, and Madame Magloire who was grumbling to herself, that there was really no need even of a wooden spoon or fork to dip a piece of bread into a cup of milk.

"Was there ever such an idea?" said Madame Magloire to herself, as she went backwards and forwards: "to take in a man like that, and to give him a bed beside him; and yet what a blessing it was that he did nothing but steal! Oh, my stars! it makes the chills run over me when I think of it!"

Just as the brother and sister were rising from the table, there was a knock at the door.

"Come in," said the Bishop.

K

The door opened. A strange, fierce group appeared on the threshold. Three men were holding a fourth by the collar. The three men were gendarmes; the fourth Jean Valjean.

A brigadier of gendarmes, who appeared to head the group, was near the door. He advanced towards the Bishop, giving a military salute.

"Monseigneur," said he

At this word, Jean Valjean, who was sullen and seemed entirely cast-down, raised his head with a stupefied air"Monseigneur!" he murmured, "then it is not the curé!" "Silence!" said a gendarme, "it is Monseigneur, the Bishop."

In the meantime Monsieur Bienvenu had approached as quickly as his great age permitted.

"Ah, there you are!" said he, looking towards Jean Valjean, "I am glad to see you. But I gave you the candlesticks also, which are silver like the rest. you not take them along with your plates ?"

Why did

Jean Valjean opened his eyes and looked at the Bishop with an expression which no human tongue could describe.

"Monseigneur," said the Brigadier, "then what this man said was true? We met him. He was going like a man who was running away, and we arrested him in order to see. He had this silver."

"And he told you," interrupted the Bishop, with a smile, "that it had been given him by a good old priest with whom he had passed the night. I see it all. And you brought him back here? It is all a mistake."

"If that is so," said the Brigadier, "we can let him go." "Certainly," replied the Bishop.

The gendarmes released Jean Valjean, who shrank back— "Is it true that they let me go?" he said in a voice almost inarticulate, as if he were speaking in his sleep.

"Yes! you can go. Do you not understand?" said a gendarme.

"My friend," said the Bishop, "before you go away, here are your candlesticks; take them."

He went to the mantelpiece, took the two candlesticks, and brought them to Jean Valjean. The two women beheld the action without a word, or gesture, or look, that might disturb the Bishop.

Jean Valjean was trembling in every limb. He took the two candlesticks mechanically, and with a wild appearance.

"Now," said the Bishop, "go in peace. By the way, my friend, when you come again, you need not come through the garden. You can always come in and go out by the front door. It is closed only with a latch, day or night." Then turning to the gendarmes, he said:

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Messieurs, you can retire." The gendarmes withdrew. Jean Valjean felt like a man who is just about to faint. The Bishop approached him, and said, in a low voice: "Forget not, never forget that you have promised me to use this silver to become an honest man."

Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of this promise, stood confounded. The Bishop had laid much stress upon these words as he uttered them. He continued, solemnly:

"Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!"

XIII.

LITTLE GERVAIS.

JEAN VALJEAN went out of the city as if he were escaping. He made all haste to get into the open country, taking the first lanes and by-paths that offered, without noticing that he was every moment retracing his steps. He wandered thus all the morning. He had eaten nothing, but he felt

no hunger. He was the prey of a multitude of new sensations. He felt somewhat angry, he knew not against whom. He could not have told whether he was touched or humiliated. There came over him, at times, a strange relenting which he struggled with, and to which he opposed the hardening of his past twenty years. This condition wearied. him. He saw, with disquietude, shaken within him that species of frightful calm which the injustice of his fate. had given him. He asked himself what should replace it. At times he would really have liked better to be in prison with the gendarmes, and that things had not happened thus; that would have given him less agitation. Although the season was well advanced, there were yet here and there a few late flowers in the hedges, the odour of which, as it met him in his walk, recalled the memories of his childhood. 'These memories were almost insupportable, it was so long since they had occurred to him.

Unspeakable thoughts thus gathered in his mind the whole day.

As the sun was sinking towards the horizon, lengthening the shadow on the ground of the smallest pebble, Jean Valjean was seated behind a thicket in a large reddish plain, an absolute desert. There was no horizon but the Alps. Not even the steeple of a village church. Jean Valjean might have been three leagues from D- A by-path which crossed the plain, passed a few steps from the thicket. In the midst of this meditation, which would have heightened not a little the frightful effect of his rags to any one who might have met him, he heard a joyous sound.

He turned his head, and saw coming along the path a little Savoyard, a dozen years old, singing, with his hurdygurdy at his side, and his marmot box on his back.

One of those pleasant and gay youngsters who go from place to place, with their knees sticking through their trowsers.