two travellers who, upon that bygone day in June, walked onward in the
great silence and serene tranquillity of the hot noon enkindled by a
younger sun. I was no longer in the schoolroom; I was in the meadows
with the shepherds walking with them this radiant summer day through the
sun-scorched flowers and grass of a Roman field,--but still all seemed
softened and vague as if looked at through a telescope that had the
power to draw into its line of vision ages long past.

Who knows? Perhaps if the Big Ape could but have divined the causes
that led to my momentary inattention it might have brought about an
understanding between us.

CHAPTER LXVI.

One Thursday evening at Limoise, just before the inevitable hour for my
departure, I went up alone to the large, old room on the second floor in
which I slept. First I leaned out of the open window to watch the July
sun sink behind the stony fields and fern heaths that lay towards the
sea, which though very near us was invisible. These sunsets at the end
of my Thursday holidays always overwhelmed me with melancholy.

During the last minutes of my stay I felt a desire, one I had never
known before, to rummage in the old Louis XV bookcase that stood near
my bed. There among the volumes in their century-old bindings, where
the worms, never disturbed, slowly bored their galleries, I found a book
made of thick rough old-fashioned paper, and this I opened carelessly.
. . . In it I read, with a thrill of emotion, that from noon until
four o'clock in the afternoon, on the 20th of June, 1813, south of
the equator, in longitude 110 and latitude 15 (between the tropics,
consequently, and in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean) there was
fair weather, a beautiful sea, a fine southeast breeze, and in the
sky many little clouds called "cat-tails," and that alongside the ship
dolphins were passing.

He who had seen the dolphins pass, and who had recorded the fugitive
cloud forms had doubtless been dead for many years. I knew that the
book was what is called a ship's log-book, one in which seafaring people
write every day. Its appearance did not strike me as strange, although
I had never before had one in my hand. But for me it was a wonderful
and unexpected experience to thus suddenly come into a knowledge of the
aspect of the sea and sky in the midst of the South Pacific Ocean, at
a given time in a year long past. . . . Oh! for a glimpse of that
beautiful and tranquil sea, of