nd playing at cards for
drinks. Provincial life, which dragged other lads, when still young,
within its cogged mechanism, that habit of going to one's club, of
spelling out the local paper from its heading to the last advertisement,
the everlasting game of dominoes no sooner finished than renewed, the
same walk at the self-same hour and ever along the same roads--all that
brutifies the mind, like a grindstone crushing the brain, filled them
with indignation, called forth their protestations. They preferred to
scale the neighbouring hills in search of some unknown solitary spot,
where they declaimed verses even amidst drenching showers, without
dreaming of shelter in their very hatred of town-life. They had even
planned an encampment on the banks of the Viorne, where they were to
live like savages, happy with constant bathing, and the company of five
or six books, which would amply suffice for their wants. Even womankind
was to be strictly banished from that camp. Being very timid and awkward
in the presence of the gentler sex, they pretended to the asceticism
of superior intellects. For two years Claude had been in love with a
'prentice hat-trimmer, whom every evening he had followed at a distance,
but to whom he had never dared to address a word. Sandoz nursed dreams
of ladies met while travelling, beautiful girls who would suddenly
spring up in some unknown wood, charm him for a whole day, and melt into
air at dusk. The only love adventure which they had ever met with still
evoked their laughter, so silly did it seem to them now. It consisted
of a series of serenades which they had given to two young ladies during
the time when they, the serenaders, had formed part of the college band.
They passed their nights beneath a window playing the clarinet and the
cornet-a-piston, and thus raising a discordant din which frightened all
the folk of the neighbourhood, until one memorable evening the indignant
parents had emptied all the water pitchers of the family over them.

Ah! those were happy days, and how loving was the laughter with
which they recalled them. On the walls of the studio hung a series of
sketches, which Claude, it so happened, had made during a recent trip
southward. Thus it seemed as if they were surrounded by the familiar
vistas of bright blue sky overhanging a tawny country-side. Here
stretched a plain dotted with little greyish olive trees as far as a
rosy network of distant hills. There, between sunburnt