cle's house to see it once more, and for the last
time, before it was delivered into the hands of strangers.

It was in November, and the cold gray sky completely changed the aspect
of the country, which I had never seen before except under the glorious
summer sun.

After spending my only morning in revisiting a thousand places, my
melancholy ever augmented by the lowering winter clouds, I found that
I had forgotten the old garden and the vine-clad arbor in whose meagre
shade I had come to so momentous a decision, and I wished to run there,
at the last moment, before my carriage took me away from this spot
forever.

"You will have to go alone," said my cousin, who was busy packing her
trunks. She gave me the large key, the same large key that I carried
in the warm and radiant days of old when I went there, net in hand,
to catch the butterflies . . . oh! the summers of my childhood, how
marvellous and how enchanting they were!

For the last time of all, I entered the garden, which under the gray
sky appeared shrunken to me. I went first to the arbor, now leafless and
desolate, in which I had written the portentous letter to my brother,
and, by means of the same breach in the wall that had served me in days
gone by, I lifted myself to the coping to get a hasty glimpse of the
surrounding country, to bid it a last farewell. Bories looked singularly
near and small to me, it was almost unrecognizably so, and the mountains
beyond seemed diminished also, appeared no higher than little hills. And
all of these things that formerly I had seen flooded with sunlight, now
looked dull and sinister in the wan, gray November light, and under the
dark and wintry clouds. I felt as if with the commencement of nature's
autumn, my life's autumn had also dawned.

And the world, the world which I had thought so immense and so full of
wonder and charm the day that I leaned on this same wall, after I had
made my decision,--the whole wide world, did it not look as faded and
shrunken to me now as this poor landscape?

And especially Bories, that under the autumnal sky looked like a phantom
of itself, filled me with the deepest sadness.

As I gazed at it I recalled the pinkish-yellow butterfly still under
its glass in my museum; it had remained there in the same spot, and had
preserved its fresh bright hues during the time that I had sailed all
round the globe. For many years I had not thought of the association
between the two things; but