'No, no,' he
cried; 'you must change. You have come here, God has led you here, and
you must embrace the opportunity.'
I made a slip in policy; I appealed to the family affections, though I
was speaking to a priest and a soldier, two classes of men
circumstantially divorced from the kind and homely ties of life.
'Your father and mother?' cried the priest. 'Very well; you will convert
them in their turn when you go home.'
I think I see my father's face! I would rather tackle the Gaetulian lion
in his den than embark on such an enterprise against the family
theologian.
But now the hunt was up; priest and soldier were in full cry for my
conversion; and the Work of the Propagation of the Faith, for which the
people of Cheylard subscribed forty-eight francs ten centimes during
1877, was being gallantly pursued against myself. It was an odd but most
effective proselytising. They never sought to convince me in argument,
where I might have attempted some defence; but took it for granted that I
was both ashamed and terrified at my position, and urged me solely on the
point of time. Now, they said, when God had led me to Our Lady of the
Snows, now was the appointed hour.
'Do not be withheld by false shame,' observed the priest, for my
encouragement.
