nswering this letter, tell me a little about
yourself, that I may also be able to put myself in your place, as you
will be able to put yourself in mine to-morrow.

But you will never completely understand M. de Sainte Beuve's verse:

"To be born, to live, and to die in one house."

A thousand kisses, my old friend,

ADELAIDE.

THE PEDDLER

How many trifling occurrences, things which have left only a passing
impression on our minds, humble dramas of which we have got a mere
glimpse so that we have to guess at or suspect their real nature, are,
while we are still young and inexperienced, threads, so to speak,
guiding us, step by step, towards a knowledge of the painful truth!

Every moment, when I am retracing my steps during the long wandering
reveries which distract my thoughts along the path through which I
saunter at random, my soul takes wing, and suddenly I recall little
incidents of a gay or sinister character which, emerging from the
shades of the past, flit before my memory as the birds flit through
the bushes before my eyes.

This summer, I wandered along a road in Savoy which commands a view of
the right bank of the Lake of Bourget, and, while my glance floated
over that mass of water, mirror-like and blue, with a unique blue,
pale, tinted with glittering beams by the setting sun, I felt my heart
stirred by that attachment which I have had since my childhood for the
surface of lakes, for rivers, and for the sea. On the opposite bank of
the vast liquid plate, so wide that you did not see the ends of it,
one vanishing in the Rhone, and the other in the Bourget, rose the
high mountain, jagged like a crest up to the topmast peak of the
"Cats's Tooth." On either side of the road, vines, trailing from tree
to tree, choked under their leaves their slender supporting branches,
and they extended in garlands through the fields, green, yellow, and
red garlands, festooning from one trunk to the other, and spotted with
clusters of dark grapes.

The road was deserted, white, and dusty. All of a sudden, a man
emerged out of the thicket of large trees which shuts in the village
of Saint-Innocent, and, bending under a load, he came towards me,
leaning on a stick.

When he had come closer to me, I discovered that he was a peddler, one
of those itinerant dealers who go about the country from door to door,
selling paltry objects cheaply, and thereupon a reminiscence of long
ago arose up in my mind, a mere