l
experiences of the future.

One day they came over and with much grace made me a present of a very
rare butterfly. It was of a pale yellow color, almost merging into light
green, the yellow of a very ordinary butterfly, but its front wings
were a shaded and exquisite pink, similar to the delicate rosy tints
sometimes seen at daybreak. They had captured it, they said, in the
late-ripening autumn grain fields of Bories,--they had caught hold of it
so deftly and carefully that their fingers had made no impression upon
its brilliant coloring. When, at about noontime, I received it from them
I was in the vestibule of my uncle's house, a place always kept tightly
closed during the hours of intense heat. From the wing of the house
I heard my cousin singing in the thin and plaintive falsetto of a
mountaineer; he often sang in that manner, and when he did so his voice
always gave me a feeling of unusual melancholy as it broke the stillness
of the late September noons. He sang over and over the same old refrain:
"Ah! Ah! The good, good story. . . ." Here he always broke off and
recommenced. And from that moment Bories, the pinkish-yellow butterfly,
and the sad little refrain of the "good, good story" were inseparably
associated in my memory.

But I fear that I have said too much about the incoherent impressions
and images which came to me so frequently in days gone by; this is the
last time that I will speak at length of them. But it will be seen,
because of what follows, how important it is for me to note the
association existing between the dissimilar things mentioned above.

CHAPTER XLIX.

We left the mountains at the beginning of October, but my home-coming
was marked by a very painful circumstance--I was sent to school! I went,
of course, only as a day scholar; and it goes without saying that I was
never allowed to go and come alone lest I should get into bad company.
The four years that I spent at the university, as a day scholar, were
as strange and as full of odd experiences as any of my life. But,
notwithstanding, from that fatal day my history becomes much less
interesting as a narrative.

I was taken to school for the first time, at two o'clock in the
afternoon, upon one of those glorious October days, so sunny and
peaceful, that is like a reluctant and sad leave-taking of the
summer-time. Ah! how beautiful it had been in the mountains, in the
leafless forests and among the autumn-tinted vines!

Wit