after school, which shut us away from the beautiful June day an
hour longer, was always a cruel torture. But to-day my heart felt
particularly heavy as I reflected that mamma would, doubtless, come at
the appointed hour and expect me,--and with some bitterness I thought
that the springtime was so very short, that the hay would soon need to
be cut, and that perhaps there would not be, the whole summer long, such
another glorious evening as this one.

As soon as school was over I anxiously consulted the fatal list in
the hands of the monitor; my name was not there! The Big Black Ape had
forgotten me, or had been merciful!

Oh! with what joy I rushed away to join mamma who had kept her promise
and who, with my father and sister, smilingly awaited me. . . . The air
that I breathed in was more delicious than ever, it was exquisitely soft
and balmy, and the atmosphere had a tropical resplendence.

When I recall that time, when I think of those meadows all abloom with
amourettes, and of those pink moths, there is mingled, to my regret, a
sort of indefinable pain whose intensity I cannot understand, an anguish
I always feel when I find myself in the presence of things that impress
and charm me with their undercurrent of mystery.

CHAPTER LXII.

I have already said that I was extraordinarily childish for my years.

If the personage I then was could but be brought into the presence of
the little Parisian boys of twelve or thirteen, educated according to
the more perfect modern method, who at so early an age declaim, discuss
and harangue, and entertain all sorts of political ideas, I would, I am
sure, be struck dumb by their discourses, and how singular they would
find me and with what disdain they would treat me!

I am myself astonished at the childishness that I displayed in certain
ways, for in artistic perception and imagination, in spite of my lack
of method, and lack of real knowledge, I was incontestably more advanced
than are the majority of boys of my age; if that youthful journal,
the strip of paper wrapped about a reed in the similitude of a
conjuring-book, of which I spoke a short time ago, were still in
existence it would emphasize twenty fold this pale record, on which it
seems to me there has already fallen the dust of ages.

CHAPTER LXIII.

My room where I now scarcely ever installed myself to study, and which
I seldom entered except at night to sleep, became, during the beautiful
mon