s kindness that it would be a sin perhaps
to ask any other reward of her than the pure and delightful pleasures
with which she sustains her children.

"Often I remember soaking my bread in milk, as I sat by the window to
take the fresh air; while my eyes wandered over a view of roofs--brown,
gray, or red, slated or tiled, and covered with yellow or green mosses.
At first the prospect may have seemed monotonous, but I very soon found
peculiar beauties in it. Sometimes at night, streams of light through
half-closed shutters would light up and color the dark abysses of this
strange landscape. Sometimes the feeble lights of the street lamps sent
up yellow gleams through the fog, and in each street dimly outlined the
undulations of a crowd of roofs, like billows in a motionless sea.
Very occasionally, too, a face appeared in this gloomy waste; above
the flowers in some skyey garden I caught a glimpse of an old woman's
crooked angular profile as she watered her nasturtiums; or, in a crazy
attic window, a young girl, fancying herself quite alone as she dressed
herself--a view of nothing more than a fair forehead and long tresses
held above her by a pretty white arm.

"I liked to see the short-lived plant-life in the gutters--poor weeds
that a storm soon washed away. I studied the mosses, with their colors
revived by showers, or transformed by the sun into a brown velvet
that fitfully caught the light. Such things as these formed my
recreations--the passing poetic moods of daylight, the melancholy mists,
sudden gleams of sunlight, the silence and the magic of night, the
mysteries of dawn, the smoke wreaths from each chimney; every chance
event, in fact, in my curious world became familiar to me. I came to
love this prison of my own choosing. This level Parisian prairie
of roofs, beneath which lay populous abysses, suited my humor, and
harmonized with my thoughts.

"Sudden descents into the world from the divine height of scientific
meditation are very exhausting; and, besides, I had apprehended
perfectly the bare life of the cloister. When I made up my mind to
carry out this new plan of life, I looked for quarters in the most
out-of-the-way parts of Paris. One evening, as I returned home to the
Rue des Cordiers from the Place de l'Estrapade, I saw a girl of fourteen
playing with a battledore at the corner of the Rue de Cluny, her winsome
ways and laughter amused the neighbors. September was not yet over; it
was warm and fine