speed. To take this step could not make me more wretched than I was; it might soothe me.
The priest within the confessional never turned his eyes to regard me; he only quietly inclined his ear to my lips. He might be a good man, but this duty had become to him a sort of form: he went through it with the phlegm of custom. I hesitated; of the formula of confession, I was ignorant: instead of commencing, then, with the prelude usual, I said:—
"Mon père, je suis Protestante".
He directly turned. He was not a native priest; of that class, the cast of physiognomy is, almost invariably, groveling: I saw by his profile and brow he was a Frenchman; though gray and advanced in years, he did not, I think, lack feeling or intelligence. He inquired, not unkindly, why, being a Protestant, I came to him?
I said I was perishing for a word of advice or an accent of comfort. I had been living for some weeks quite alone; I had been ill; I had a pressure of affliction on my mind of which it would hardly any longer endure the weight.
"Was it a sin, a crime?" he inquired, somewhat startled.
I reassured him on this point, and, as well as I could, I showed him the mere outline of my experience.
He looked thoughtful, surprised, puzzled. "You take me unawares", said he. "I have not had such a case as yours before: ordinarily we know our routine and are prepared, but this makes a great break in the common course of confession. I am hardly furnished with counsel fitting the circumstances".
Of course, I had not expected he would be; but the mere relief of communication in an ear which was human and sentient, yet consecrated—the mere pouring out of some portion of long accumulating, long pent-up pain into a vessel whence it could not be again diffused—had done me good. I was already solaced.
"Must I go, father?" I asked of him, as he sat silent.
"My daughter", he said kindly—and I am sure he was a kind man: he had a compassionate eye—"for the present you had better go; but I assure you your words have struck me. Confession, like other things, is apt to become formal and trivial with habit. You have come and poured your heart out; a thing seldom done. I would fain think your case over, and take it with me to my oratory. Were you of our faith I
