s, sad and weird and vague took possession of me
and affrighted but fascinated me. That I might remain hidden as long as
possible I crouched lower and still lower, and I felt the joy a little
Indian boy feels when he is in his beloved forest.

Suddenly I heard someone call: "Pierre! Pierre! Dear Pierre!" I did not
reply, but instead lay as close as possible to the ground, and sought to
hide under the weeds and the waving branches of the asparagus.

Still I heard: "Pierre, Pierre." It was Lucette; I knew her voice, and
from the mockery of her tone I felt sure that she had spied me. But I
could not see her although I looked about me very carefully: no one was
visible!

With peals of laughter she continued to call, and her voice grew merrier
and merrier. Where can she be? thought I.

Ah! At last I spied her perched upon the twisted branch of a tree that
was overhung with gray moss!

I was fairly caught and I came out of my green hiding place.

As I rose I gazed over the wild and flowering things, and saw the corner
of the old moss-grown wall that enclosed the garden. That wall was
destined to be at a later time a very familiar haunt of mine, for on
the Thursday holidays during my college life I spent many a happy hour
sitting upon it contemplating the peaceful and quiet country, and there
I mused, to the chirping accompaniment of the crickets, of those distant
countries fairer and sunnier than my own. And upon that summer day those
gray and crumbling stones, defaced by the sun and weather, and overgrown
with mosses, gave me for the first time an indefinable impression of the
persistence of things; a vague conception of existences antedating my
own, in times long past.

Lucette D----, my elder by eight or ten years, seemed to me already a
grown person. I cannot recall the time when I did not know her. Later I
came to love her as a sister, and her early death in her prime was one
of the first real griefs of my boyhood.

And the first recollection I have of her is as I saw her in the branches
of the old pear tree. Her image doubtless begets a vividness from the
two new emotions with which it is blended: the enchanting uneasiness
I felt at the invasion of green nature and the melancholy reverie that
took possession of me as I contemplated the old wall, type of ancient
things and olden times.

CHAPTER IV.

I will now endeavor to explain the impression that the sea made upon
me at our first brief and melanc