Instead of cones, a fir tree was dotted with chestnuts like shining stars, and, moreover, it flaunted this strange contrast: the orange--that golden sun of Eastern orchards--and the medlar, which looks like a posthumous fruit of a tree that has died of cold! Not far away there was a throng of still more fully developed miracles. Flora was elbowing Pomona, as the good Demoustier would have phrased it. Most of the plants that formed this crowd were strange to me, and I only remember the commoner ones, those that anybody knows the list of. I can still see an astounding willow which bore hortensias and peonies, peaches and strawberries. But the prettiest of all those hybrids was perhaps a rose tree with ox-eyes for flowers and crab-apples for fruit. In the center of the rotunda a bush showed a mingling of leaves so dissimilar as those of the holly, the lime and the poplar. Having pressed them apart I satisfied myself that they issued all three from a single stem. It was the triumph of grafting--a science that Lerne had for fifteen years been pushing to the verge of the miraculous, so far indeed that the results presented a somewhat disquieting spectacle. “When man sets his hand to Life, he makes monsters.” A kind of uneasiness troubled me. “What right has one to upset Creation?” I said to myself. “Should one turn the ancient laws topsy-turvy? Can one play this sacrilegious game without high treason against Nature? If only those artificial things had been in good taste! But, devoid of real novelty, they were merely curious mixtures, a sort of vegetable chimeras, floral Fauns, half this and half that. On my honor, graceful or not, this kind of work is impious, and that’s the long and the short of it.” Be that as it may, the Professor had toiled most laboriously to bring his work to so successful an issue. The collection vouched for that, and there were other signs that recalled the _savant’s_ industry: on a table I perceived rows of bottles and an array of grafting-tools and gardening implements which glittered like surgical instruments. This discovery sent me back to the flowers, and looking into the matter I became aware of all their wretchedness. They were plastered with various sorts of gum, bandaged and full of gashes which were like wounds, out of which oozed a suspicious juice. There was a wound in the bark of the pear-bearing orange tree that formed an eye which was slowly shedding tears. I was becoming quite nervous. Would one have believed it? I was assailed by a ridiculous anguish as I looked at the oak-tree (which had had an operation) because I fancied the cherries looked like drops of blood...! Flop! flop! Two ripe ones fell at my feet like the first drops of a thunder-storm. I was no longer possessed of the calm necessary for reading the labels. They merely told me a few dates--and the fact that Lerne had covered them with Franco-German terms which had originally been illegible, and were rendered more so by erasures.