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 forms of religious faith in all regions of our mother earth. What the reader falls in love with is in each case a milieu, to which he finds himself bound in a kind of sacramental relation—so much of its natural beauty, and so much of its elemental humanity have entered, with such an exquisitely melancholy commentary, into his heart through his thrilled senses.

Let us have one illustration of Loti's white magic, aspersing his pages with the odors of a delicious spring in the Pyrenees, on the soft nights when young Basque smugglers run their contraband over the Spanish border and return in time for early mass:

There certainly is one of Loti's extraordinary achievements: to make each one of nearly two score volumes of which the scenes are wherever a French cruiser calls or the colonial empire has extended—to make each volume stir all the senses and reek of its proper scene as pungently as the jacket of Ramuntcho reeked of the mint of the mountain above Mendiazpi.