l subjects escape him. A
child is protected by the limit of feebleness against emotions which are
too complex. He sees the fact, and little else beside. The difficulty of
being satisfied by half-ideas does not exist for him. It is not until
later that experience comes, with its brief, to conduct the lawsuit of
life. _Then_ he confronts groups of facts which have crossed his path;
the understanding, cultivated and enlarged, draws comparisons; the
memories of youth reappear under the passions, like the traces of a
palimpsest under the erasure; these memories form the bases of logic,
and that which was a vision in the child's brain becomes a syllogism in
the man's. Experience is, however, various, and turns to good or evil
according to natural disposition. With the good it ripens, with the bad
it rots.

The child had run quite a quarter of a league, and walked another
quarter, when suddenly he felt the craving of hunger. A thought which
altogether eclipsed the hideous apparition on the hill occurred to him
forcibly--that he must eat. Happily there is in man a brute which serves
to lead him back to reality.

But what to eat, where to eat, how to eat?

He felt his pockets mechanically, well knowing that they were empty.
Then he quickened his steps, without knowing whither he was going. He
hastened towards a possible shelter. This faith in an inn is one of the
convictions enrooted by God in man. To believe in a shelter is to
believe in God.

However, in that plain of snow there was nothing like a roof. The child
went on, and the waste continued bare as far as eye could see. There had
never been a human habitation on the tableland. It was at the foot of
the cliff, in holes in the rocks, that, lacking wood to build themselves
huts, had dwelt long ago the aboriginal inhabitants, who had slings for
arms, dried cow-dung for firing, for a god the idol Heil standing in a
glade at Dorchester, and for trade the fishing of that false gray coral
which the Gauls called _plin_, and the Greeks _isidis plocamos_.

The child found his way as best he could. Destiny is made up of
cross-roads. An option of path is dangerous. This little being had an
early choice of doubtful chances.

He continued to advance, but although the muscles of his thighs seemed
to be of steel, he began to tire. There were no tracks in the plain; or
if there were any, the snow had obliterated them. Instinctively he
inclined eastwards. Sharp stones had wounded his