t to that of the small
ducks, the pond aflower with illusions: those ponds do not occur twice
in a lifetime. For luck like that, you must be in all the new glory of
your first breeches and your first ideas.

Many another have I come upon since that distant time, ponds very much
richer and, moreover, explored with the ripened eye of experience.
Enthusiastically I searched them with the net, stirred up their mud,
ransacked their trailing weeds. None in my memories comes up to the
first, magnified in its delights and mortifications by the marvelous
perspective of the years.

Nor would any of them suit my plans of today. Their world is too vast. I
should lose myself in their immensities, where life swarms freely in the
sun. Like the ocean, they are infinite in their fruitfulness. And then
any assiduous watching, undisturbed by passers by, is an impossibility
on the public way. What I want is a pond on an extremely reduced
scale, sparingly stocked in my own fashion an artificial pond standing
permanently on my study table.

A louis has been overlooked in a corner of the drawer. I can spend it
without seriously jeopardizing the domestic balance. Let me make this
gift to science, who, I fear, will be none too much obliged to me. A
gorgeous equipment may be all very well for laboratories wherein the
cells and fibers of the dead are consulted at great expense; but such
magnificence is of doubtful utility when we have to study the actions
of the living. It is the humble makeshift, of no value, that stumbles on
the secrets of life.

What did the best results of my studies of instinct cost me? Nothing
but time and, above all, patience. My extravagant expenditure of
twenty francs, therefore, will be a risky speculation if devoted to the
purchase of an apparatus of study. It will bring me in nothing in the
way of fresh views, of that I am convinced. However, let us try.

The blacksmith makes me the framework of a cage out of a few iron rods.
The joiner, who is also a glazier on occasion--for, in my village, you
have to be a Jack-of-all-trades if you would make both ends meet--sets
the framework on a wooden base and supplies it with a movable board as
a lid; he fixes thick panes of glass in the four sides. Behold the
apparatus, complete, with a bottom of tarred sheet iron and a trap to
let the water out.

The makers express themselves satisfied with their work, a singular
novelty in their respective shops, where many an inquisi