Fabre was so steeped in this passion for knowledge that he wished to evoke it in his brother, now teacher at Lapalud, on the Rhône, not far from Orange. It seemed to him that he would delight in his wealth still better could he share it with another. (2/7.) He stimulated him, pricked him on, and sought to encourage the remarkable aptitude for mathematics with which he believed him endowed. He employed his whole strength in breathing into the other's mind "that taste for the true and the beautiful" which possessed his own nature; he wished to share with him those stores of learning "which he had for some years so painfully amassed"; he would profit by the vacation to place them at his disposal; they would work together "and the light would come." Above all his brother must not allow his intelligence to slumber, must beware of "extinguishing that divine light without which one can, it is true, attend to one's business, but which alone can make a man honourable and respected." Let him, on the contrary, cultivate his mind incessantly, "the only patrimony on which either of us can count"; the reward would be his moral well-being, and, he hoped, his physical welfare also. Once more he reinforced his advice by that excellent counsel which was always his own lodestar: "Science, Frédéric, knowledge is everything...You are too good a thinker not to say with me that no one can better employ his time than by acquiring fresh knowledge...Work, then, when you have the opportunity...an opportunity that very few may possess, and for which you ought to be only too thankful. But I will stop, for I feel my enthusiasm is going to my head, and my reasons are so good already that I have no need of still more triumphant reasons to convince you." (2/8.) He had only one passion: shooting; more especially the shooting of larks. This sport delighted him, "with the mirror darting its intermittent beams under the rays of the morning sun amid the general scintillation of the dewdrops and crystals of hoarfrost hanging on every blade of grass." (2/9.) His sight was admirably sure, and he rarely missed his aim. His passion for shooting was always sustained by the same motive: the desire to acquire fresh knowledge; to examine unknown creatures close at hand; to discover what they ate and how they lived. Later, when he again took up his gun, it was still because of his love of life: it was to enable him to enumerate, inventory, and interrogate his new compatriots, his feathered fellow-citizens of Sérignan; to inform himself of their diet, to reveal the contents of their crops and gizzards. At one time he suddenly ceased to employ this distraction; he seems to have sacrificed it easily, under the stress of present necessities and cruel anxieties as to his uncertain future. "When we do not know where we shall be tomorrow nothing can distract us." (2/10.)