The bright colours worn by the women in their Sunday clothes, and the picturesque forms of the men, in their huge broad-brimmed flapping hats, harmonized well with the thick green foliage around them.

They shewed no sign of impatience, they were quite content to wait there, and pray, or gossip, or make love to each other, till such time as Father Jerome should please to come; they had no idea that their time was badly spent in waiting for so good a man.
At any rate he came before they were tired, and with him came a man who was a stranger to them all, except to Jacques Chapeau.

This man was but little, if anything, better dressed than themselves; he looked like one of their own farmers of the better days; certainly from his dress and manner he had no pretensions to be called a gentleman, and yet he walked and talked with Father Jerome as though he were his equal.
"God bless you, my children, God bless you," said the Cure, in answer to the various greetings he received from his flock.

"Follow me, my children, and we will worship God beneath the canopy of his holy throne," and then turning to the stranger, he added: "the next time you visit me at St.Laud's, M.d'Elbee, we shall, I doubt not, have our church again.

I could now desire the people to force the doors for me, and no one would dare to hinder them; but I have been thrust from my altar and pulpit by a self-constituted vain authority--but yet by authority; and I will not resume them till I do so by the order of the King or of his servants." "I reverence the house of God," replied M.d'Elbee, "because his spirit has sanctified it; but walls and pillars are not necessary to my worship; a cross beneath a rock is as perfect a church to them who have the will to worship, as though they had above them the towers of Notre Dame, or the dome of St.Peter's." "You are right, my son; it is the heart that God regards; and where that is in earnest, his mercy will dispense with the outward symbols of our religion; but still it is our especial duty to preserve to his use everything which the piety of former ages has sanctified; to part willingly with nothing which appertains in any way to His church.