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dearest connexions, anchored in the roads. The heart of Louis, still untainted, yielded to the anticipations of the solemn adieu he was about to take of the kind parent, to whom he owed the small fund of useful knowledge which exercised and enriched his mind, and of the affectionate Hortense, his pet and playmate; and these emotions so far softened his temper, as to lead M. Perrault to draw the most flattering omens of the steadiness and circumspection of his future conduct. As for Henri, he was of a temper so reserved and still, and so methodically correct in all his movements, as to lull asleep all apprehension of his well-doing. But Louis had another parting to endure. Gabrielle de Montfort, of an ancient and loyal family in Britanny, had been reared from infancy in her father's house, at Pondicherry, where he filled the high office of chief-in-council, the highest colonial appointment next to that of the governor. Habituated to the climate as well as the society of the settlement, and unlike, in this respect, our own civil or military servants in India, the French in that country were seldom tormented with the disquietude we call the home-fever, but lived happy and contented on their salaries, which, augmented in some cases by annual remittances from their native provinces, enabled them to live, if not as splen

didly, as comfortably, as the British at the neighbouring settlement of Madras.

The soft and scarcely perceptible gradations, by which childish predilections are ripened into lasting attachments, have been frequently traced. They might have been traced in Louis and Gabrielle. On the day before his departure, Louis frequently mingled his tears with those of his sister-then, suddenly wiping them away, cheered her with gay anticipations of future and happier meetings. Hortense could feel the solace of such enlivening topics; but Gabrielle could not. She shed few or no tears. There was that at her heart which was beyond tearswhich tears neither expressed nor relieved. It seemed to be allied to some sad forebodings, for which she could assign no reason, but could not suppress.

Hours like these, painful, indeed, and heavy, are some of the most useful and purifying of our lives. It is to these hours, and the feelings belonging to them, that the mind will turn, with an overwhelming sense of self-reproach, when, at a distance from those with whom we have exchanged our parting sympathies, and released from the restraints imposed by their presence, we have yielded to temptation, and done that which would give them shame or sorrow. Nor did Louis, amidst all the errors of his after-life, ever forget the chastening lesson

of that scene.

When the dreaded moment came, he sought not to conceal what he felt, as with one hand he held that of his sister, and with the other pressed Gabrielle's to his bosom. "Courage! courage !" exclaimed M. Perrault; "it is only a three years' separation. How speedily will that time pass away! How little is it in the remembrance of the past! Let us not give it an undue importance in our reckonings of the future." It was a painful effort to the father himself to be firm;— nature would have her way;-in a moment, parent and son were sobbing in a close embrace. M. Perrault suffered not the remaining minutes to depart unimproved. He reminded both of the temptations that would assail them in the world they were about to be thrown into; but the emphasis and strength of the exhortation were directed to Louis. He dwelt on the filthy-mindedness of sensual vices, however tricked out in the gorgeous attire of Parisian voluptuousness. But upon the sordidness and wickedness of gaming, he spake with the resistless eloquence of virtue. Never was that most odious of our propensities more skilfully dissected and laid bare in its true deformity. "It effaced," he said, "all the simplicity of truth, and every charity of love and friendship from the heart, leaving it a void, cold, sterile, and unfruitful of the affections."

Above all, he called to mind the rising spirit of disloyalty in France, withering the chivalrous and heroic gallantry, the exalted devotion, the white and unsullied faith, on which the throne, during a long succession of ages, had reposed-conjuring his son to shun the clubs and societies that had begun to undermine the religious feelings of his countrymen, and with it the moral sense which religion, if it did not infuse, strengthened and confirmed. "Should the conflict break out, let Louis Perrault remember him, that his ancestors never shrunk from the cause of the king and the law, nor spared their wealth and blood in its support. Such were the last valedictory words of Casimir Perrault to his sons.

The incidents of the voyage, the bustle of the ship, and the different places at which they touched, allowed scarcely sufficient leisure for the renewal of the melancholy feelings with which the youths left the parental roof. In the solitude of the nightwatches, or during the short twilight of the tropics, when the whole horizon glows with that world of shadowy imagery, out of which fancy sketches new scenes of home, and hope, and love, Louis often sat unseen to steal a look or two at some trifling trinket which had once been Gabrielle's-perhaps a lock of that jetty hair he had himself severed-a rapine

soon and tenderly forgiven. When they landed at Havre, the youths had another parting to undergo; but there was an uncongenial element or two in their dispositions, that rendered the parting affectionate though common-place. Henri, occupied with shaping the future plans of an industrious and virtuous life, hastened to his destination in Brittany; and to Louis the varieties of the landscape, so unlike the dull, cheerless scenery of the Coromandel coast, and the cheerful, brisk conversation of a French diligence, in which there is always a good-hearted contest to be kind and agreeable, brought a pleasing relief from depressing recollections.

At Paris, he commenced his studies with the usual assiduity of beginners, not unmindful of the admonitions of the best of friends, and shrinking with the alarm of virtue from the dangers which beset youth and inexperience in the most dangerous of capitals. He shunned, above all, the gamblinghouses in the neighbourhood of that voluptuous palace, occupied by the most abandoned of princes; and held the debating-clubs in still greater abhorrence. But every day familiarized him with the increasing licentiousness and insubordination of the people; and these impressions were so faithfully described in his letters to Pondicherry, that Casimir

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