am of liquid metal. To the west, a line of low rugged
hills threw slight violet streaks on the pale sky.

I had been living in this out-of-the-way corner for ten years. How often
had I kept my uncle Lazare waiting to give me my Latin lesson! The worthy
man wanted to make me learned. But I was on the other side of the Durance,
ferreting out magpies, discovering a hill which I had not yet climbed.
Then, on my return, there were remonstrances: the Latin was forgotten, my
poor uncle scolded me for having torn my trousers, and he shuddered when
he noticed sometimes that the skin underneath was cut. The valley was
mine, really mine; I had conquered it with my legs, and I was the real
landlord by right of friendship. And that bit of river, those two leagues
of the Durance, how I loved them, how well we understood one another when
together! I knew all the whims of my dear stream, its anger, its charming
ways, its different features at each hour of the day.

When I reached the water's edge on that particular morning, I felt
something like giddiness at seeing it so gentle and so white. It had never
looked so gay. I slipped rapidly beneath the willows, to an open space
where a broad patch of sunlight fell on the dark grass. There I laid me
down on my stomach, listening, watching the pathway by which Babet would
come, through the branches.

"Oh! how sound uncle Lazare must be sleeping!" I thought.

And I extended myself at full length on the moss. The sun struck gentle
heat into my back, whilst my breast, buried in the grass, was quite cool.

Have you never examined the turf, at close quarters, with your eyes on the
blades of grass? Whilst I was waiting for Babet, I pried indiscreetly into
a tuft which was really a whole world. In my bunch of grass there were
streets, cross roads, public squares, entire cities. At the bottom of it,
I distinguished a great dark patch where the shoots of the previous spring
were decaying sadly, then slender stalks were growing up, stretching out,
bending into a multitude of elegant forms, and producing frail colonnades,
churches, virgin forests. I saw two lean insects wandering in the midst of
this immensity; the poor children were certainly lost, for they went from
colonnade to colonnade, from street to street, in an affrighted, anxious
way.

It was just at this moment that, on raising my eyes, I saw Babet's white
skirts standing out against the dark ground at the top of the pathway. I
recogniz