The Story of a Child

CHAPTER LXXIV.

Those Thursdays at Limoise when the fierce heat of the noon-day sun overwhelmed everything, and the country side lay asleep and silent under its pitiless rays, it was my habit to clamber up to the top of the old wall that enclosed the garden, and there I sat astride and immovable for a long time. The branching ivy reached to my shoulders and innumerable flies and locusts buzzed around me. From the height of this observatory I had a view of the hot and lonely region lying beyond, of the moorland and woodland, and from there I saw a thin white veil of mist that was agitated ceaselessly by the waves of heat, as the surface of a tiny lake is ruffled by the least wind. Those horizons seen from Limoise still had for me the strange mystery I had endowed them with in the first summers of my life. The region visible from the top of the wall was a rather solitary one, and I tried to make myself believe that the waste land and woodland was a veritable untrodden country that stretched out indefinitely; and although I now knew well that about me everywhere there were roads; cultivated fields, and prosperous villages, I succeeded in clinging to the illusion that the surrounding country and contiguous lands were wild and primitive.

And the better to deceive myself I took care to shut out, by looking through my fingers folded together spy-glass fashion, all that would have spoiled for me the impression of loneliness; an old farm house, for instance, with its bit of cultivated vineyard and smooth road.

And there all alone, in that silence murmurous with the buzzing of many insects, distracted by nothing, always turning my hollowed hand towards the most desolate portion of the landscape, I succeeded in gaining an impression of distant, tropical countries.

I had impressions of Brazil particularly, but I do not know why in those moments of contemplation the neighboring forest always suggested that country to me.

In passing I must describe this forest, the first one of all the earth's forests that I knew, and the one I loved the best: the straight, slim trunks of the ancient evergreen oaks, of sombre foliage, were like the columns of a church; not a particle of brush grew under them, but the dry soil was covered all the year with the most exquisite short grass, soft and fine as down, and here and there grew furze, dropwort and other rare flowers that thrive in the shade.