hought of myself as soon to
be clothed in a resplendent white robe, as soon to be seated in a great
splendor of light among the multitude of angels and chosen ones around
the throne of the Blessed Lamb; I saw myself in the midst of a
great moving orb that, to the sound of music, oscillated slowly and
continuously in the infinite void of heaven.

CHAPTER XIV.

"Once upon a time a little girl when she opened a large fruit that had
come from the colonies, a big creature came out of it, a green creature,
and it bit her and that made her die."

It was my little friend Antoinette (she was six and I seven) who was
telling me the story which had been suggested to her because we were
about to break and divide an apricot between us. We were at the extreme
end of her garden in the lovely month of June under a branching apricot
tree. We sat very close together upon the same stool in a house about as
big as a bee-hive, which we had built for our exclusive use out of old
planks. Our dwelling was covered with pieces of foreign matting that had
come from the Antilles packed about some boxes of coffee. The sunbeams
pierced the roof, which was of a coarse straw-colored material, and
the warm breeze that stirred the leaves of the trees about us made the
sunlight dance as it fell upon our faces and aprons. (During at least
two summers it had been our favorite amusement to build, in isolated
nooks, houses like the one described in Robinson Crusoe, and thus hidden
away we would sit together and chat.) In the story of the little girl
who was bitten by the big creature this phrase, "a very large fruit
from the colonies," had suddenly plunged me into a reverie. And I had
a vision of trees, of strange fruits, and of forests filled with
marvelously colored birds. Ah! how much those magical but disturbing
words, "the colonies" conveyed to me in my childhood. To me they meant
at that time all tropical and distant countries, which I invariably
thought of as filled with giant palms, exquisite flowers, strange black
people and great animals. Although my ideas were so confused I had an
almost true conception, amounting to an intuition, of their mournful
splendor and their enervating melancholy.

I think that I saw a palm for the first time in an illustrated book
called the "Young Naturalists," by Madame Ulliac-Tremadeure; the book
was one of my New Year's gifts, and I read some parts of it upon New
Year's evening. (Green-house palms had n