going to start. It was late--the good
places would be taken in the Bois.

"To the Bois de Boulogne, on Sunday!" exclaimed Paul de Gery.

"Oh, our Bois is not yours," replied Aline with a smile. "Come with us,
and you will see."

Did it ever happen to you, in the course of a solitary and contemplative
walk, to lie down on your face in the undergrowth of a forest, amid that
vegetation which springs up, various and manifold, through the fallen
autumn leaves, and allow your eyes to wander along the level of the
ground before you? Little by little the sense of height is lost, the
interwoven branches of the oaks above your head form an inaccessible
sky, and you behold a new forest extending beneath the other, opening
its deep avenues filled by a green and mysterious light, and formed
of tiny shrubs or root fibres taking the appearance of the stems
of sugar-canes, of severely graceful palm-trees, of delicate cups
containing a drop of water, of many-branched candlesticks bearing little
yellow lights which the wind blows on as it passes. And the miraculous
thing is, that beneath these light shadows live minute plants and
thousand of insects whose existence, observed from so near at hand, is
a revelation to you of all the mysteries. An ant, bending like a
wood-cutter under his burden, drags after it a splinter of bark bigger
than itself; a beetle makes its way along a blade of grass thrown like a
bridge from one stem to another; while beneath a lofty bracken standing
isolated in the middle of a patch of velvety moss, a little blue or red
insect waits, with antennae at attention, for another little insect
on its way through some desert path over there to arrive at the
trysting-place beneath the giant tree. It is a small forest beneath a
great one, too near the soil to be noticed by its big neighbours, too
humble, too hidden to be reached by its great orchestra of song and
storm.

A similar revelation awaits in the Bois de Boulogne. Behind those sanded
drives, watered and clean, whereon files of carriage-wheels moving
slowly round the lake trace all day long a worn and mechanical furrow,
behind that admirably set scene of trimmed green hedges, of captive
water, of flowery rocks, the true Bois, a wild wood with perennial
undergrowth, grows and flourishes, forming impenetrable recesses
traversed by narrow paths and bubbling springs.

This is the Bois of the children, the Bois of the humble, the little
forest beneath the great