The Story of a Child

CHAPTER XV.

I will now describe a game that gave Antoinette and me the greatest pleasure during those two delicious summers.

We pretended to be two caterpillars, and we would creep along the ground upon our stomachs and our knees and hunt for leaves to eat. After having done that for some time we played that we were very very sleepy, and we would lie down in a corner under the trees and cover our heads with our white aprons—we had become cocoons. We remained in this condition for some time, and so thoroughly did we enter into the role of insects in a state of metamorphosis, that any one listening would have heard pass between us, in a tone of the utmost seriousness, conversations of this nature:

“Do you think that you will soon be able to fly?”

“Oh yes! I'll be flying very soon; I feel them growing in my shoulders now . . . they'll soon unfold.” (“They” naturally referred to wings.)

Finally we would wake up, stretch ourselves, and without saying anything we conveyed by our manner our astonishment at the great transformation in our condition. . . .

Then suddenly we began to run lightly and very nimbly in our tiny shoes; in our hands we held the corners of our pinafores which we waved as if they were wings; we ran and ran, and chased each other, and flew about making sharp and fantastic curves as we went. We hastened from flower to flower and smelled all of them, and we continually imitated the restlessness of giddy moths; we imagined too that we were imitating their buzzing when we exclaimed: “Hou ou ou!” a noise we made by filling the cheeks with air and puffing it out quickly through the half-closed mouth.