of silver from the
ends of the branches, streaked the grass with long lines of emeralds,
and flung gold spots on the beds of dead leaves. When they let their
heads fall back, they could distinguish the sky through the tops of the
trees. Some of them, which were enormously high, looked like patriarchs
or emperors, or, touching one another at their extremities formed with
their long shafts, as it were, triumphal arches; others, sprouting forth
obliquely from below, seemed like falling columns. This heap of big
vertical lines gaped open. Then, enormous green billows unrolled
themselves in unequal embossments as far as the surface of the valleys,
towards which advanced the brows of other hills looking down on white
plains, which ended by losing themselves in an undefined pale tinge.

Standing side by side, on some rising ground, they felt, as they drank
in the air, the pride of a life more free penetrating into the depths of
their souls, with a superabundance of energy, a joy which they could not
explain.

The variety of trees furnished a spectacle of the most diversified
character. The beeches with their smooth white bark twisted their tops
together. Ash trees softly curved their bluish branches. In the tufts of
the hornbeams rose up holly stiff as bronze. Then came a row of thin
birches, bent into elegiac attitudes; and the pine-trees, symmetrical as
organ pipes, seemed to be singing a song as they swayed to and fro.
There were gigantic oaks with knotted forms, which had been violently
shaken, stretched themselves out from the soil and pressed close against
each other, and with firm trunks resembling torsos, launched forth to
heaven despairing appeals with their bare arms and furious threats, like
a group of Titans struck motionless in the midst of their rage. An
atmosphere of gloom, a feverish languor, brooded over the pools, whose
sheets of water were cut into flakes by the overshadowing thorn-trees.
The lichens on their banks, where the wolves come to drink, are of the
colour of sulphur, burnt, as it were, by the footprints of witches, and
the incessant croaking of the frogs responds to the cawing of the crows
as they wheel through the air. After this they passed through the
monotonous glades, planted here and there with a staddle. The sound of
iron falling with a succession of rapid blows could be heard. On the
side of the hill a group of quarrymen were breaking the rocks. These
rocks became more and more numerous a