e father said:

"We are going to be extravagant for once, and ride in a tram to the
suburbs."

They went out.

They had many times seen well-dressed men and beautiful ladies give a
signal to the driver of the tram, who immediately stopped his horses
to permit them to get on.

The honest workman was carrying his little girl. His wife and he
stopped at a street-corner.

A tram, shiny with paint, came toward them, almost empty. And they
felt a great joy when they thought of how they were going to enter it
for four sous apiece. And the honest workman signaled to the conductor
to stop the horses. But he seeing they were poor simple people looked
at them disdainfully, and would not halt his vehicle.

ABSENCE

At eighteen Pierre left the home in the country where he had been
born.

At the very moment when he left, his old mother was ill in bed in
the blue room, where there were the daguerreotype of his father and
peacock-feathers in a vase and a clock representing Paul and Virginia.
Its hands pointed to the hour of three.

In the courtyard under the fig-tree his grandfather was resting.

In the garden his fiancee stood among roses and gleaming pear-trees.

* * * * *

Pierre went to earn his living in a country where there were negroes
and parrots and india-rubber trees and molasses and fevers and snakes.

He dwelled there thirty years.

* * * * *

At the very moment when he returned to the home in the country where
he had been born, the blue room had faded to white, his mother was
reposing in the bosom of heaven, the picture of his father was no
longer there, the peacock-feathers and the vase had disappeared. Some
sort of object stood in the clock's place.

In the courtyard under the fig-tree where his grandfather, who had
long since died, had been accustomed to rest, there were broken plates
and a poor sick chicken.

In the garden of roses and gleaming pear-trees where his fiancee had
stood, there was an old woman.

The story does not tell who she was.

THE HIGHWAY OF LIFE

One day a poet sat down at a table to write a story. Not a single
idea would come to him, but nevertheless he was happy, because the sun
shone on a geranium on the window-sill, and because a gnat flew about
in the blue of the open window.

Suddenly his life appeared before him like a great white road. It
began in a dark grove where there were laughing