Loup, and the place not a street but a shed in
yard, and the time not midday but after midnight^
. . . Christ and Mireio . . . Mireio and Chris-
tophe. ...
He would cover his face and begin to pray: 'Lord,
I am only eleven years old ... I am big and clumsy
but my brain feels quite small. I%m stupid, I cannot
learn anything from books, and I do not understand
... no, I do not understand what it is that makes me
so different from people. Lord, I want to be kind,
but I do not like pain, I do not like knowing so much
about pain —-1 have told Your golden Saint Loup
this already. And I do not want to see things all
wrong as I did when I saw You kneeling by Mireio,
because though I see wrong I feel I see right, and it
worries me ... Jan says that I shall go mad . . .*
His prayer would trail off into vague confused words
about Jan and Mireio and liis own First Communion.
But one late afternoon as he sat near the ruins
trying to pray and but ill succeeding, he uncovered
his face rather suddenly and looked down on a green
and most bountiful valley, and he heard the rushing
and splash of a stream — a soft turbulent sound, and
the singing of birds that had never sung on the hills
of Saint Loup, yet the notes of whose songs were
completely familiar. And beyond, very far away,
he perceived not the dark, rugged, unclothed peaks
of the Maures, but the peaks of much higher and
snow-capped mountains.
Then he spoke, but softly, for some joy is so fragile
that it breaks at the touch of our coarsened vibra-
tions: 'Galilee ... I am looking at Galilee.' And
his heart was dissolved in a peace so immense that
it passed even his profound understanding, while
his eyes filled with slow, reminiscent tears —the
tears of a wanderer who had come home to the happy
greenness and peace of that valley. 'You are beautiful,
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