iled in wine, and so on to the
place where the river is held by a weir and opens out into a kind of
lake.

Here I waited for a moment by the wooden railing, and looked up into
the hills. So far I had been at home, and I was now poring upon the
last familiar thing before I ventured into the high woods and began my
experience. I therefore took a leisurely farewell, and pondered
instead of walking farther. Everything about me conduced to
reminiscence and to ease. A flock of sheep passed me with their
shepherd, who gave me a good-night. I found myself entering that
pleasant mood in which all books are conceived (but none written); I
was 'smoking the enchanted cigarettes' of Balzac, and if this kind of
reverie is fatal to action, yet it is so much a factor of happiness
that I wasted in the contemplation of that lovely and silent hollow
many miles of marching. I suppose if a man were altogether his own
master and controlled by no necessity, not even the necessity of
expression, all his life would pass away in these sublime imaginings.

This was a place I remembered very well. The rising river of Lorraine
is caught and barred, and it spreads in a great sheet of water that
must be very shallow, but that in its reflections and serenity
resembles rather a profound and silent mere. The steeps surrounding it
are nearly mountainous, and are crowned with deep forests in which the
province reposes, and upon which it depends for its local genius. A
little village, which we used to call 'St Peter of the Quarries', lies
up on the right between the steep and the water, and just where the
hills end a flat that was once marshy and is now half fields, half
ponds, but broken with luxuriant trees, marks the great age of its
civilization. Along this flat runs, bordered with rare poplars, the
road which one can follow on and on into the heart of the Vosges. I
took from this silence and this vast plain of still water the repose
that introduces night. It was all consonant with what the peasants
were about: the return from labour, the bleating folds, and the
lighting of lamps under the eaves. In such a spirit I passed along the
upper valley to the spring of the hills.

In St Pierre it was just that passing of daylight when a man thinks he
can still read; when the buildings and the bridges are great masses of
purple that deceive one, recalling the details of daylight, but when
the night birds, surer than men and less troubled by this illusion of