owed hand towards
the most desolate portion of the landscape, I succeeded in gaining an
impression of distant, tropical countries.

I had impressions of Brazil particularly, but I do not know why in those
moments of contemplation the neighboring forest always suggested that
country to me.

In passing I must describe this forest, the first one of all the earth's
forests that I knew, and the one I loved the best: the straight, slim
trunks of the ancient evergreen oaks, of sombre foliage, were like the
columns of a church; not a particle of brush grew under them, but the
dry soil was covered all the year with the most exquisite short grass,
soft and fine as down, and here and there grew furze, dropwort and other
rare flowers that thrive in the shade.

CHAPTER LXV.

The Iliad was being explained to us in class,--no doubt I would have
loved it, but our master had made it odious by his analysis, his
difficult tasks and his parrot-like recitals;--but suddenly I stopped,
filled with admiration of a famous line, whose end is musical as the
murmur of the waves of the incoming tide as they spread their sheets of
foam upon the pebbly shore.

"Observe," said the Big Ape, "observe the inceptive harmony."

Zounds! Yes, I had observed it. Little need to take the trouble to point
out such a sentence to me.

I also had a great admiration, less justified perhaps, for some lines
from Virgil.

Since the beginning of the Ecloque I had, with the greatest interest,
followed the two shepherds as they made their way across the fields
of ancient Rome. I could picture it to myself so vividly, those Roman
meadows of two thousand years ago: hot, a little sterile, with thickets
of almost petrified shrubs, and evergreen oaks like the stony moorland
of Limoise, where I had experienced precisely the pastoral charm that I
discovered in this description of a past time.

Onward went the two shepherds, and suddenly, they perceived that their
journey was half over, "because the tomb of Bianor was immediately below
them . . ." Oh! how vividly I saw that tomb of Bianor disclose itself to
their view. Its old stones, that made a white blot on the reddish road,
were covered with tiny sun-scorched plants, wild thyme or marjoram, and
here and there grew stunted dark foliaged shrubs. And the sonority of
the word Bianoris with which the sentence ended suddenly and magically
evoked for me the musical humming of the insects that buzzed around the