In front of the little chapel grew some nettle-trees, the sweet blossoms of which, hanging in tempting clusters, often lured us to climb the branches, to the destruction of our garments. There was also a well, bored and cut in the rock, which, by a subterranean outlet, poured its waters down into a basin, and, descending further, watered the kitchen garden. Below the garden, at the entrance of the valley, grew a clump of white poplars, brightening up the rather barren landscape. For Saint-Michel was a wild solitary spot, the old monastery being built on a plateau in a narrow passage between the mountains, far from the haunts of men, as the inscription over the entrance truly testified: “I fled from the cities, where injustice and vanity reign unchecked, and sought for solitude. This is the place I have chosen for my habitation. Here shall I find rest.” The spurs of the mountains around were covered with thyme, rosemary, asphodel, box and lavender. In some protected corners grew vines, which produced, strange to say, a vintage of some renown--the famous wine of Frigolet. A few olive-trees were planted on the spur of the hills, and here and there in the broken stony ground, rows of almond-trees, tortuous, rugged and stunted. In the clefts of the rocks might be seen occasional wild fig-trees. This was all the vegetation these rocky hills could show, the rest was only waste land and crushed boulders. But how good it smelt, this odour of the mountains, how intoxicating as we drank it in at sunrise! The generality of schoolboys are penned up in big cold courtyards between four walls, but we had the mountains for our playground. On Thursdays, and every day at recreation hours, no sooner were we let out than we were off like partridges, over valley and mountain, until the convent bell rang out the recall. No danger of our suffering from dulness. In the glorious summer sunshine the ortolan sang afar his “Tsi tsi béau”; and we rolled in the sweet thyme or roamed in search of forgotten almonds and green grapes left on the vines. We gathered mushrooms, set traps for the birds, searched the ravines for those fossils called in all that countryside “Saint Stephen’s stones,” hunted in the grottos for the Golden Goat, and climbed and tumbled about till our parents found it hardly possible to keep us decently clothed or shod.