At such times, to recall the winged visitant, gentle, yet withal
sensitive to offence, which had settled on his youth with so deep a
sense of assurance, he would climb the tower of Jean de Beauce, then
fresh in all its array of airy staircase and pierced traceries, and
great uncovered timbers, like some gigantic birdnest amid the stones,
whence the large, quiet, country spaces became his own again, and the
curious eye, at least, went home. He was become well aware of the
power of those familiar influences in restoring equanimity, as he
might have used a medicine or a wine. At each ascending storey, as
the flight of the birds, the scent of the fields, swept past him,
till he stood at last amid the unimpeded light and air of the watch-
chamber above the great bells, some coil of perplexity, of
unassimilable thought or fact, fell away from him. He saw the
distant paths, and seemed to hear the breeze piping suddenly upon
them under the cloudless sky, on its unseen, capricious way through
those vast reaches of atmosphere. At this height, the low ring of
blue hills was visible, with suggestions of that south-west country
of peach-blossom and wine which had sometimes decoyed his thoughts
towards the sea, and beyond it to "that new world of the Indies,"
[42] which was held to explain a certain softness in the air from
that quarter, even in the most vehement weather. Amid those vagrant
shadows and shafts of light must be Deux-manoirs, the deserted rooms,
the gardens, the graves. In mid-distance, even then a funeral
procession was on its way humbly to one of the village churchyards.
He seemed almost to hear the words across the stillness.

They identified themselves, as with his own earliest prepossessions,
so also with what was apt to present itself as being the common human
prepossession--a certain finally authoritative common sense upon the