I should go without faltering to the ash under whose shade my heart beat so loudly one sunny spring morning. I had caught sight of a sort of white, cottony ball among the branches. Peeping from the depths of the wadding was an anxious little head with a red hood to it. O what unparalleled luck! It was a Goldfinch, sitting on her eggs. Compared with a find like this, lesser events do not count. Let us leave them. In any case, they pale before the memory of the paternal garden, a tiny hanging garden of some thirty paces by ten, situated right at the top of the village. The only spot that overlooks it is a little esplanade on which stands the old castle (The Chateau de Saint-Leons standing just outside and above the village of Saint-Leons, where the author was born in 1823. Cf. "The Life of the Fly": chapters 6 and 7.--Translator's Note.) with the four turrets that have now become dovecotes. A steep path takes you up to this open space. From my house on, it is more like a precipice than a slope. Gardens buttressed by walls are staged in terraces on the sides of the funnel-shaped valley. Ours is the highest; it is also the smallest. There are no trees. Even a solitary apple-tree would crowd it. There is a patch of cabbages, with a border of sorrel, a patch of turnips and another of lettuces. That is all we have in the way of garden-stuff; there is no room for more. Against the upper supporting-wall, facing due south, is a vine-arbour which, at intervals, when the sun is generous, provides half a basketful of white muscatel grapes. These are a luxury of our own, greatly envied by the neighbours, for the vine is unknown outside this corner, the warmest in the village. A hedge of currant-bushes, the only safeguard against a terrible fall, forms a parapet above the next terrace. When our parents' watchful eyes are off us, we lie flat on our stomachs, my brother and I, and look into the abyss at the foot of the wall bulging under the thrust of the land. It is the garden of monsieur le notaire. There are beds with box-borders in that garden; there are pear-trees reputed to give pears, real pears, more or less good to eat when they have ripened on the straw all through the late autumn. In our imagination, it is a spot of perpetual delight, a paradise, but a paradise seen the wrong way up: instead of contemplating it from below, we gaze at it from above. How happy they must be with so much space and all those pears! We look at the hives, around which the hovering Bees make a sort of russet smoke. They stand under the shelter of a great hazel. The tree has sprung up all of itself in a fissure of the wall, almost on the level of our currant-bushes. While it spreads its mighty branches over the notary's hives, its roots, at least, are on our land. It belongs to us. The trouble is to gather the nuts.