Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. I.djvu/304

320 infirmities of the old people were not treated as sorrows. They were borne by them so cheerfully.

The aged pastor Coulin is a patriarch in appearance, as well as in life and disposition. The short periods which he consecrates to prayer morning and evening, are genuine pearls of their kind. A pearl of heavenly dew, which fructifies one and all.

I lived here for about a month; how peacefully the days passed! The weather was charming; I saw the trees come out into leaf, the lofty walnut-trees, unfolding by degrees their ruddy-brown, as it were, not yet awakened, leaf clusters; listened to the song of the nightingale in the thick lilac hedges under the blossoming fruit-trees. Every day I spent some time in a grove, upon a little hill in the grounds, and nearly always found the nightingale there, seated upon a bough, sometimes quite near to me, and singing so deliciously that it was a perfect joy to listen. For this enchanting little bird seems to love human beings, and its song is, as it were, a conversation with its hearers. Its separate sentences have each separate meanings, and one has time between each to have one's own thoughts. The nightingale replies to them; it encourages; it consoles; and its pearl-like trills are irresistibly refreshing; one drinks in with them the purest champagne of nature. I sometimes went thither, into the grove of the nightingale, when the visits of strangers had wearied me, and there is no weariness so great as that which human beings experience from their own kind—and the nightingale then came and sang peace and freshness into my spirit. There, too, I sat, more than once, with friends whose conversation