fellows,
themselves only grown children, were much delighted with my child's
play.

What will always remain an incomprehensible mystery to me is that in my
family, where we seldom sinned through an excess of reserve towards
each other, they shut their eyes to my trick, and thus tacitly gave me
permission to play it during the entire spring; I am not able to explain
to myself how it chanced that they failed to correct me, and the years
instead of clearing up this mystery only serve to intensify it.

That black bird has naturally become one of my many relics; at
intervals, during the past two or three years, I have looked at it; it
is somewhat dingy, but it always recalls to me the beautiful evenings
in June, now vanished, the delicious intoxication of that springtime of
long ago.

CHAPTER LXXIV.

Those Thursdays at Limoise when the fierce heat of the noon-day sun
overwhelmed everything, and the country side lay asleep and silent under
its pitiless rays, it was my habit to clamber up to the top of the old
wall that enclosed the garden, and there I sat astride and immovable for
a long time. The branching ivy reached to my shoulders and innumerable
flies and locusts buzzed around me. From the height of this observatory
I had a view of the hot and lonely region lying beyond, of the moorland
and woodland, and from there I saw a thin white veil of mist that was
agitated ceaselessly by the waves of heat, as the surface of a tiny lake
is ruffled by the least wind. Those horizons seen from Limoise still had
for me the strange mystery I had endowed them with in the first summers
of my life. The region visible from the top of the wall was a rather
solitary one, and I tried to make myself believe that the waste land
and woodland was a veritable untrodden country that stretched out
indefinitely; and although I now knew well that about me everywhere
there were roads; cultivated fields, and prosperous villages, I
succeeded in clinging to the illusion that the surrounding country and
contiguous lands were wild and primitive.

And the better to deceive myself I took care to shut out, by looking
through my fingers folded together spy-glass fashion, all that would
have spoiled for me the impression of loneliness; an old farm house, for
instance, with its bit of cultivated vineyard and smooth road.

And there all alone, in that silence murmurous with the buzzing of many
insects, distracted by nothing, always turning my holl