"I promised you that, if I died before you, I would come to tell you. I was drowned yesterday in the river at Caen, about this hour. I was out walking; it was so warm that we took a notion to bathe. A weakness came over me in the river, and I sank to the bottom. The Abbé de Menil-Jean, my companion, plunged in to draw me out; I seized his foot; but whether he thought it was a salmon that had caught hold of him, or that he felt it actually necessary to go up to the surface of the water to breathe, he shook me off so roughly that his foot gave me a great blow in the chest, and threw me to the bottom of the river, which is there very deep."
Desfontaines then told his friend many other things, which he would not divulge, whether the dead boy had prayed him not to do so, or for other reasons.
Bezuel wanted to embrace the apparition, but he found only a shadow. Nevertheless, the shadow had squeezed his arm so tightly, that it pained him after.
He saw the spirit several times, yet always a little taller than when they parted, and always in the half-clothing of a bather. He wore in his fair hair a scroll on which Bezuel could only read the word In. His voice had the same sound as when he was living, he appeared neither gay nor sad, but perfectly tranquil. He charged his friend with several commissions for his parents, and begged him to say for him the Seven Penitential Psalms, which had been given him as a penance by his confessor, three days before his death, and which he had not yet recited.
The apparition always ended by a farewell expressed in words which signified: "Till we meet again! (Au revoir!)" At last, it ceased at the end of some weeks; and the surviving friend, who had constantly prayed for the dead, concluded from this that his Purgatory was over.
This Monsieur Bezuel finished his studies, embraced the ecclesiastical state, became curé of Valogne, and lived long, esteemed by his parishioners and the whole city, for his good sense, his virtuous life, and his love of truth.
THE PENANCE OF DON DIEGO RIEZ.
A Legend of Lough Derg. [1]
[Footnote 1: Lough Derg, in Donegal, was a place famous for pilgrimage from a very early period, and was much resorted to out of France, Italy, and the Peninsula, during the Middle Ages, and even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Mathew Paris, and Froissart, as well as in our native annals, and in O'Sullivan Beare, there are many facts of its extraordinary history.]