Monsieur l'AbbÉ Jacques Picot, in the old home of many pillars, sat in the library at his desk writing his memoirs. He was dressed with unusual neatness in the garb of a French priest. His closely cropped hair showed a well-shaped head, while his face, freshly shaven, presented strikingly interesting features. His mouth was big and amiable, his lips full yet firmly set, his nose almost too large, and his prominent lower jaw bespoke a strong will. It was a pair of humorous gray eyes, twinkling in irrepressible goodwill, that lighted and relieved a countenance which otherwise might have appeared unduly severe.... Can you imagine the disciple Peter with the eyes of Rabelais? Had he been a saint he would have been Francis of Assisi.

The room in which he wrote was filled with books and manuscripts. The library, upon closer inspection, would have shown that it was largely given to general literature. Subjects upon theology were conspicuously absent. The tastes of the owner were evidenced by the volumes upon the table. Poems by Ronsard; Rabelais' "Les Faits et Dicts Heroisques du Bon Pantegruel," "Twelfth Night" by Shakespeare, and "The Life and Adventures of Guzman d'Alfarache" by Mateo Aleman.

As he wrote in a memorandum evidently intended for amplification later, then to be placed in the memoirs, he smiled as if taking a whimsical joy in what he recorded.

This is what Monsieur l'AbbÉ wrote:

On the afternoon of September 14, as I took my first walk upon my return home, I watched, quite unobserved by me, a tow-headed, freckle-faced boy, just reaching the Dumas stage of his charmed life, wade through the hot limestone dust of the turnpike, which forms Oldmeadow's chief street, and, upon reaching the spring just without the town, stand and cool his feet in the water of which he had drunk but a moment before. Even to this day I never see a small boy but what, if the opportunity presents itself, I look to see if he is web-footed. If certain illustrious warriors of an age when there never appeared to have been any real boys may be said to have been, like Romulus, suckled by a she-wolf, so it seems most of the youths I know must have been turned out by their mothers to be reared by the ducks. At any rate I know what an instinct all normal, healthy boys have for puddles.

Now I think I have a very acute intuition about boys and their thoughts. This time it was not different. This self-conscious boy was saying good-by to the very little boy, more than half baby, that he had been ever since he could remember. Previously he had been just a child, without sex-consciousness. All of the fluffy little girls were merely a part of the landscape. A part, at that, whose existence to him, so far as their being of any use, was a mystery. To him they were as superficial in their importance as the mice from which they ran in horror, or the abominable cats which they chose to pet. He had always proved sufficient unto his little self, and there was really no one whom he felt that he could really do without, unless it be mother, father, and the river. Recognizing his superior physical strength when compared with that of girls, and measuring all things by this prowess, his inability to place them in their proper relationship to life increased with each new feat. There was where his world lay, and girls were forbidden. It is true Nance Gwyn possessed some recommendatory qualifications, yet her frequent readiness to tears kept her without the pale.

Finally it was this same Nance who burst his world like a bubble and sent him forth upon a quest which would occupy him for the remainder of his life. Within the past year there had softly and unwittingly crept upon him a knowledge of her necessity to his well-being. He now saw in a measure her place in the whole. She was now in the ascendancy, and he knew in his boyish heart that she always would be. And while he never doubted it being worth it, he was sure that he had paid a great price. He had given something that, however much he longed to retain it, he might never hope to have again. He had given his very little boyhood with its irresponsible innocence born of this same lack of any appreciation of sex. For this tenderness that had brought him to know and feel the thrill of a thousand sweet mysteries in the now glorious Nance he had given up the circus days, the joy in a dirty face, the fun of hearing her squeal in response to his torments, and from a sort of undesirable, weak boykin, in a fluff of little skirts, whose only redeeming quality was a vain attempt to be like "the fellows," she became of a sudden a woman-child with all the alluring and delightful charms of girlhood.

It is only fair to say that had the boy been asked to choose between the two, he would have unhesitatingly taken the life he knew lay all before him, unlived, unfulfilled, full of mystery, hope and Her. Yet it was no disloyalty, no cowardice to spend a day in getting used to the new by dwelling in tender memory over the old.

So he stretched himself under a hillside tree, and held his head in his hands with fingers interlaced beneath. His bare knees were crossed with one wet muddy foot propped in the air, while the other found a hold in the moss at the roots of his shelter. His eyes wandered through the green cool leaves above him and noted the wonderful blue of the sky where the white clouds sailed like great, snow-sheeted ships in a sea of turquoise. They seemed very beautiful, very kind, very prophetic of the joy of the long, long days to be. Everything now seemed different. It was the same colorful late summer heaven of a year ago, it was true, but to it there had been added a new, more vital meaning. The blue was the same as that of her eyes and the clouds spelled her name.

It seemed that before he had never discovered that there were so many girls in the world. Everywhere there was nothing but bright eyes in lovely fresh faces, always beaming in friendly innocence upon him. He had scarcely noticed them before. Now they lent a subtle joy, an alluring mystery to everything with which they were associated. A bit of ribbon, a piece of lace, was no longer a portion of silk or so much linen.

For him, of a surety, God had created "a new heaven and a new earth." Forgotten was the ancient story of Eve and the garden. Now Nance, of the sun-colored hair, was the first woman. And as he lay in a fine sensuous health beneath the sky, which brought to him the deep color of her eyes, it seemed that a voice, calling him from somewhere within the mighty distance, named him Adam. It unnerved and startled him. Turning upon his face he burst into tears. His small shoulders shook convulsively, and for the first time he sobbed as does a man. As his body heaved with the pain of his unaccountable sorrow, a top with a soiled string fell from his pocket, and, rolling down the hill, lay neglected in the mud; a bird in the tree-top above broke the stillness of the afternoon with a full-throated, joyous song to his mate; a great white cloud, passing over the sun, cast a soft running shadow across the valley to the ridges; all nature seemed to sigh, like a sleeping child, or was it the oaten pipes of Pan, and then to awaken into new life.