n. The
first-floor tenant hardly ever walks there. His son, a schoolboy of
seventeen, was there this morning. He stood two feet from the street
wall, motionless, with head thrown back, whistling a monotonous air,
which seemed to me like a signal. Before him, however, was nothing but
the moss on the old wall gleaming like golden lights. People do not
whistle to amuse stones nor yet moss. Farther off, on the other side of
the street, the windows of the opposite houses stretched away in long
straight lines, most of them standing open.

I thought: "The bird is somewhere there. Some small Abigail with her
white cap will look out in a moment."

The suspicion was stupid and ill-natured. How rash are our lightest
judgments! Suddenly the school-boy took one step forward, swept his hand
quickly along the moss as if he were trying to catch a fly, and ran off
to his mother triumphant, delighted, beside himself, with an innocent
gray lizard on the tips of his fingers.

"I've got him! I've got him! He was basking in the sun and I charmed
him!"

"Basking in the sun!" This was a revelation to me. I flung up the window.
Yes, it was true. Warmth and light lay everywhere: on the roofs still
glistening with last night's showers; across the sky, whose gay blue
proclaimed that winter was done. I looked downward and saw what I had not
seen before: the willow bursting into bud; the hepatica in flower at the
foot of the camellias, which had ceased to bloom; the pear-trees in the
Carmelites' garden flushing red as the sap rose within them; and upon the
dead trunk of a fig-tree was a blackbird, escaped from the Luxembourg,
who, on tiptoe, with throat outstretched, drunk with delight, answered
some far-off call that the wind brought to him, singing, as if in
woodland depths, the rapturous song of the year's new birth. Then, oh!
then, I could contain myself no longer. I ran down the stairs four at a
time, cursing Paris and the Junian Latins who had been cheating me of the
spring. What! live there cut off from the world which was created for me,
tread an artificial earth of stone or asphalt, live with a horizon of
chimneys, see only the sky chopped into irregular strips by roofs
smirched with smoke, and allow this exquisite spring to fleet by without
drinking in her bountiful delight, without renewing in her youthfulness
our youth, always a little staled and overcast by winter! No, that can
not be; I mean to see the spring.

And I have seen it