And then the up-and-down "ding, dang, dong, ding," of the clock-bells begins its little song in four verses that means the end of an hour. And then come the six slow deep calls of the biggest bell that tell what hour it is. It is the hour for us to go home. [Illustration: AN HOUR OF LIVING OR THE DANCE OF DEATH] AN HOUR OF LIVING; OR, THE DANCE OF DEATH "But why didn't he go back if he liked France so much better; and if he had plenty of money?" asked Mary. "Ah, well, even having plenty of money doesn't always make it possible to do just what we prefer," I say. "The truth is,--if it is the truth, and not just malicious gossip,--it was exactly because he had plenty of money that he couldn't go back. He is supposed to have got that money in some wrong way. Anyway, he didn't seem to care to go back to _la belle France_, but preferred to live solitarily here, and to plant lines of trees and lay out little lakes and build rockwork towers and make terraces and driveways and paths, all in very formal lines, as in the parks at Versailles and St. Cloud, which were the playgrounds of French kings and the pride of all France." Mary and I were seated on a curious little cement-and-stone imitation tower-ruin that stuck up out of Frenchman's Pond, which is near the campus, and is a good place for seeing things and getting away from the classroom bells. A long row of scraggly Lombardy poplars stretches away from the pond along an old terraced roadway with a cave opening on it. Around two sides of the little lake is a rockwork wall, and across one end, where the pond narrows, is a picturesque stone bridge of single span. Everything is neglected, and altogether Frenchman's Pond and its surroundings are a good imitation of something old and foreign in this glaringly new and extremely Californian bit of the world. It is a favorite place for us to come when I want to tell Mary stories of the castles on the Rhine. We get a proper atmosphere. It was so sunny and warm this morning that we had given up chatting and were simply sitting or sprawling as comfortably as we could on the irregular top of our _Aussichtsthurm_. A few flying dragons, some in bronze-red mail, some in greenish blue, were wheeling about over the pond, and a meadow-lark kept up a most cheerful singing in the pasture nearby. It was really just the sort of day and place and feeling that Mary and I like best. We knew we ought, as persevering Nature students, to get down and poke around in the weeds and ooze of the edges of the pond so as to see things. But we didn't want to do it, and so we didn't. That is one perfectly beautiful thing about the way Mary and I study Nature. We don't when we don't want to.