nvaluable bits
of grass that he had collected and classified; and yet were one of us
wounded, he would nurse him with a kindness and zeal that none could
surpass.

One day he noticed my gold box as I was putting it in my bosom, and he
immediately begged me to let him have it, to keep a few flies' legs and
grasshoppers' wings which he would have defended with the last drop of
his blood. It needed all the reverence I had for the relics of my love
to resist the demands of friendship. All he could obtain from me was
permission to hide away a very pretty little plant in my precious box.
This plant, which he declared he was the first to discover, was allowed
a home by the side of my _fiancee's_ ring and note only on condition
that it should be called Edmunda sylvestris; to this he consented. He
had given the name of Samuel Adams to a beautiful wild apple-tree;
he had christened some industrious bee or other Franklin; and nothing
pleased him more than to associate some honoured name with his ingenious
observations.

The attachment I felt for him was all the more genuine from its being my
first friendship with a man of my own age. The pleasure which I derived
from this intimacy gave me a new insight into life, and revealed
capacities and needs of the soul of which I had hitherto been ignorant.
As I could never wholly break away from that love of chivalry which had
been implanted in me in early childhood, it pleased me to look upon him
as my "brother in arms," and I expressed a wish that he would give me
this special title too, to the exclusion of every other intimate friend.
He caught at the idea with a gladness of heart that showed me how lively
was the sympathy between us. He declared that I was a born naturalist,
because I was so fitted for a roving life and rough expeditions.
Sometimes he would reproach me with absent-mindedness, and scold me
seriously for carelessly stepping upon interesting plants, but he would
assert that I was endowed with a sense of method, and that some day
I might invent, not a theory of nature, but an excellent system of
classification. His prophecy was never fulfilled, but his encouragement
aroused a taste for study in me, and prevented my mind from being wholly
paralyzed by camp life. To me he was as a messenger from heaven;
without him I should perhaps have become, if not the Hamstringer of
Roche-Mauprat, at all events the savage of Varenne again. His teachings
revived in me the consciousness o