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 ground with its dead leaves at the first frost, in the
playground of the Batifol institution, which was a place without any
distractions.

This solitary tree, which was like any other sycamore, middle-aged and
without any singularities, ought to have had the painful feeling that
it served in a measure to deceive the public. In fact, upon the
advertisement of the Batifol institution (Cours du lycee Henri IV.
Preparation au baccalaureat et aux ecoles de l'Etat), one read these
fallacious words, "There is a garden;" when in reality it was only a
vulgar court graveled with stones from the river, with a paved gutter in
which one could gathe