lt. I should like to see you sleep all night on a
chair--you would have something to say."

She was getting angry and excited and was talking loud.

The child was still crying. A poor delicate timid little fellow, a
veritable child of the wardrobe, of the cold, dark closet, a child who
from time to time was allowed to get a little warmth in the bed if it
chanced to be unoccupied.

I also felt inclined to cry.

And I went home to my own bed.

THE MOUNTAIN POOL

Saint Agnes, May 6.
MY DEAR FRIEND:
You asked me to write to you often and to tell you in particular about
the things I might see. You also begged me to rummage among my
recollections of travels for some of those little anecdotes gathered from
a chance peasant, from an innkeeper, from some strange traveling
acquaintance, which remain as landmarks in the memory. With a landscape
depicted in a few lines, and a little story told in a few sentences you
think one can give the true characteristics of a country, make it living,
visible, dramatic. I will try to do as you wish. I will, therefore,
send you from time to time letters in which I will mention neither you
nor myself, but only the landscape and the people who move about in it.
And now I will begin.

Spring is a season in which one ought, it seems to me, to drink and eat
the landscape. It is the season of chills, just as autumn is the season
of reflection. In spring the country rouses the physical senses, in
autumn it enters into the soul.

I desired this year to breathe the odor of orange blossoms and I set out
for the South of France just at the time that every one else was
returning home. I visited Monaco, the shrine of pilgrims, rival of Mecca
and Jerusalem, without leaving any gold in any one else's pockets, and I
climbed the high mountain beneath a covering of lemon, orange and olive
branches.

Have you ever slept, my friend, in a grove of orange trees in flower? The
air that one inhales with delight is a quintessence of perfumes. The
strong yet sweet odor, delicious as some dainty, seems to blend with our
being, to saturate us, to intoxicate us, to enervate us, to plunge us
into a sleepy, dreamy torpor. As though it were an opium prepared by the
hands of fairies and not by those of druggists.

This is a country of ravines. The surface of the mountains is cleft,
hollowed out in all directions, and in these sinuous crevices grow
veritable forests of lemon trees. Here and