eath the
other, opening its long avenues pierced by a mysterious green light and
lined by slender or tufted shrubs ending in round tops of exotic or wild
aspect, stalks of sugar-cane, the graceful rigidity of palms, slender
cups holding a drop of water, girandoles bearing little yellow lights
which flicker in the passing breeze. And the miraculous feature of it
all is that beneath those slender stalks live miniature plants and
myriads of insects whose existence, seen at such close quarters, reveals
all its mysteries to you. An ant, staggering like a woodcutter under his
burden, drags a piece of bark larger than himself; a beetle crawls along
a blade of grass stretched like a bridge from trunk to trunk; while,
beneath a tall fern standing by itself in a clearing carpeted with
velvety moss, some little blue or red creature waits, its antennae on the
alert, until some other beast, on its way thither by some deserted path,
arrives at the rendezvous under the gigantic tree. It is a small forest
beneath the large one, too near the ground for the latter to perceive
it, too humble, too securely hidden to be reached by its grand orchestra
of songs and tempests.

A similar phenomenon takes place in the Bois de Boulogne. Behind those
neat, well-watered gravelled paths, where long lines of wheels moving
slowly around the lake draw a furrow by constant wear throughout the
day, with the precision of a machine, behind that wonderful
stage-setting of verdure-covered walls, of captive streams, of
flower-girt rocks, the real forest, the wild forest, with its luxuriant
underbrush, advances and recedes, forming impenetrable shadows traversed
by narrow paths and rippling brooks. That is the forest of the lowly,
the forest of the humble, the little forest under the great. And Paul,
who knew nothing of the aristocratic resort save the long avenues, the
gleaming lake as seen from the back seat of a carriage or from the top
of a break in the dust of a return from Longchamps, was amazed to see
the deliciously secluded nook to which his friends escorted him.

It was on the edge of a pond that lay mirrorlike beneath the willows,
covered with lilies and lentils, with great patches of white here and
there, where the sun's rays fell upon the gleaming surface, and streaked
with great tendrils of _argyronetes_ as with lines drawn by diamond
points.

They had seated themselves, to listen to the reading of the play, on the
sloping bank, covered with v