ses, continued to flow over and
wash away my early faith. My shrinking from life increased rather than
diminished. There seemed to hang between me and the years to come a
great curtain whose heavy folds it was impossible for me to lift.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

In preceding chapters I have not said much about that Limoise which
was the scene of my initiation into nature and its wonders. My entire
childhood is intimately connected with that little corner of the world,
with its ancient forests of oak trees, and its rocky moorlands covered
here and there with a carpet of wild thyme and heather.

For ten or twelve glorious summers I went there to spend my Thursday
holidays, and I dreamed of it during the dreary intervening days of
study.

In May our friends the D-----s and Lucette went to their country home
and remained until vintage time, usually until after the first October
frost,--and regularly every Wednesday evening I was taken there.

Nothing in my estimation was so delightful as that journey to Limoise.
We scarcely ever went in a carriage, for it was not more than three and
a half miles distant; to me, however, it seemed very far, almost lost in
the woods. It lay toward the south, in the direction of those distant,
sunny lands I loved to think of. (I would have found it less charming
had it been towards the north.)

Every Wednesday evening, at sunset, the hour therefore varying with the
month, I left home accompanied by Lucette's elder brother, a grown boy
of eighteen or twenty, who seemed to me a man of mature age. As far as
I was able I tried to keep pace with him, and, in consequence, I was
obliged to go more rapidly than when I walked with my father and sister;
we went through the quiet streets lying near the ramparts, and passed
the sailors' old barracks, the sounds of whose bugles and drums reached
as far as my attic museum when the south wind blew; then we passed
through the fortifications by the most ancient of its gray gates,--a
gate almost abandoned, and used now principally by peasants with flocks
of sheep and droves of cattle,--and finally we arrived at the road that
led to the river.

A mile and a half of straight road stretched before us, and this path
lay between stunted old trees yellow with lichens whose branches were
blown to the left by the force of the sea-winds that almost constantly
came from the west, sweeping over the broad and level meadows that lay
between us and the ocean.

To