would make
excursions into the country to see the first hawthorn-trees in bloom.

Once in the fields we never left them again during the rest of our
Meseglise walk. They were perpetually crossed, as though by invisible
streams of traffic, by the wind, which was to me the tutelary genius of
Combray. Every year, on the day of our arrival, in order to feel that I
really was at Combray, I would climb the hill to find it running again
through my clothing, and setting me running in its wake. One always
had the wind for companion when one went the 'Meseglise way,' on
that swelling plain which stretched, mile beyond mile, without any
disturbance of its gentle contour. I knew that Mlle. Swann used often
to go and spend a few days at Laon, and, for all that it was many
miles away, the distance was obviated by the absence of any intervening
obstacle; when, on hot afternoons, I would see a breath of wind emerge
from the farthest horizon, bowing the heads of the corn in distant
fields, pouring like a flood over all that vast expanse, and finally
settling down, warm and rustling, among the clover and sainfoin at my
feet, that plain which was common to us both seemed then to draw us
together, to unite us; I would imagine that the same breath had passed
by her also, that there was some message from her in what it was
whispering to me, without my being able to understand it, and I would
catch and kiss it as it passed. On my left was a village called Champieu
(_Campus Pagani_, according to the Cure). On my right I could see
across the cornfields the two crocketed, rustic spires of
Saint-Andre-des-Champs, themselves as tapering, scaly, plated,
honeycombed, yellowed, and roughened as two ears of wheat.

At regular intervals, among the inimitable ornamentation of their
leaves, which can be mistaken for those of no other fruit-tree, the
apple-trees were exposing their broad petals of white satin, or hanging
in shy bunches their unopened, blushing buds. It was while going
the 'Meseglise way' that I first noticed the circular shadow which
apple-trees cast upon the sunlit ground, and also those impalpable
threads of golden silk which the setting sun weaves slantingly downwards
from beneath their leaves, and which I would see my father slash through
with his stick without ever making them swerve from their straight path.

Sometimes in the afternoon sky a white moon would creep up like a little
cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an ac