wide sleeves.

"What can those mice on the roof have done to him?" thought
Chrysantheme. Of course she could not understand. In a coaxing manner,
like a playful kitten, she glanced at me with her half-closed eyes,
inquiring why I did not come back to sleep,--and I returned to my
place by her side.

XI.

_July 14th_.

It is the National Fete day of France. In Nagasaki roadstead, all the
ships are dressed out with flags, and salutes are firing in our honor.

Alas! All day long, I cannot help thinking of that last fourteenth of
July, spent in the deep calm and stillness of my old home, the door
closed to all intruders, while the gay crowd roared outside; there I
had remained till evening, seated on a bench, shaded by a trellis
covered with honeysuckle, where in the bye-gone days of my childhood's
summers, I used to settle myself with my copybooks and pretend to
learn my lessons. Oh! those days when I was supposed to learn my
lessons: how my thoughts used to rove,--what voyages, what distant
lands, what tropical forests did I not behold in my dreams! At that
time, near the garden bench, in some of the crevices in the stone
wall, there dwelt many a big ugly black spider ever on the watch,
peeping out of his nook ready to pounce upon any giddy fly or
wandering centipede. One of my amusements consisted in tickling the
spiders gently, very gently, with a blade of grass or a cherry stalk
in their holes. Mystified, they would rush out, fancying they had to
deal with some sort of prey, whilst I would rapidly draw back my hand
in disgust. Well, last year, on that fourteenth of July, as I recalled
my days of Latin themes and translations, now forever flown, and this
game of boyish days, I actually recognized the very same spiders (or
at least their daughters), lying in wait in the very same holes.
Gazing at them and at the tufts of grass and moss around me, a
thousand memories of those summers of my early life welled up within
me, memories which for years past had lain slumbering under this old
wall, sheltered by the ivy boughs. While all that is ourselves
perpetually changes and passes away, the constancy with which Nature
repeats, always in the same manner, her most infinitesimal details,
seems a wonderful mystery; the same peculiar species of moss grow
afresh for centuries on precisely the same spot, and the same little
insects each summer do the same thing in the same place.

* * * *