confused and worried, and said in a broken voice:

"What do you want me to do? I do not earn enough to put him to school!
I have to keep him with me, and I cannot afford to pay for another room,
by heavens! He sleeps with me when I am alone. If any one comes for one
hour or two he can stay in the wardrobe; he keeps quiet, he understands
it. But when people stay all night, as you have done, it tires the poor
child to sleep on a chair.

"It is not his fault. 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