n his mother
since two days before.

"Mamma! I want to see mamma!"

It was necessary then to try to make him understand the truth. Madame
Gerard repeated to him that he ought to be very wise and good, and try to
console his father, who had much to grieve him; for his mother had gone
away forever; that she was in heaven.

In heaven! heaven is very high up and far off. If his mother was in
heaven, what was it that those porters dressed in black carried away in
the heavy box that they knocked at every turn of the staircase? What did
that solemn carriage, which he followed through all the rain, quickening
his childish steps, with his little hand tightly clasped in his father's,
carry away? What did they bury in that hole, from which an odor of
freshly dug earth was emitted--in that hole surrounded by men in black,
and from which his father turned away his head in horror? What was it
that they hid in this ditch, in this garden full of crosses and stone
urns, where the newly budded trees shone in the March sun after the
shower, large drops of water still falling from their branches like
tears?

His mother was in heaven! On the evening of that dreadful day Amedee
dared not ask to "see mamma" when he was seated before his father at the
table, where, for a long time, the old woman in a short jacket had placed
only two plates. The poor widower, who had just wiped his eyes with his
napkin, had put upon one of the plates a little meat cut up in bits for
Amedee. He was very pale, and as Amedee sat in his high chair, he asked
himself whether he should recognize his mother's sweet, caressing look,
some day, in one of those stars that she loved to watch, seated upon the
balcony on cool September nights, pressing her husband's hand in the
darkness.

CHAPTER II

SAD CHANGES

Trees are like men; there are some that have no luck. A genuinely
unfortunate tree was the poor sycamore which grew in the playground of an
institution for boys on the Rue de la Grande-Chaumiere, directed by M.
Batifol.

Chance might just as well have made it grow upon the banks of a river,
upon some pretty bluff, where it might have seen the boats pass; or,
better still, upon the mall in some garrison village, where it could have
had the pleasure of listening twice a week to military music. But, no! it
was written in the book of fate that this unlucky sycamore should lose
its bark every summer, as a serpent changes its skin, and should scatter
the