Some white clouds were floating in a cold sky. The wind was coming from Grey-l’Abbaye, and brought me through the gorge the monotonous sound of the church bells. Endlessly they repeated the same three notes, thus performing the chime of the Arlésienne. I was gay! To this sacred accompaniment I whistled the melody played by the orchestra, and the juxtaposition of the two was like placing a modern statuette on a Gothic pedestal. In front of the laboratory, on the other side of the road, there was a wood. I made tacks to reach it, having formed my plan of assault. In the middle of this wood, I used to possess an old friend--a fir tree. Its projecting branches formed a spiral staircase. It completely dominated the buildings. No laboratory could have been better placed, or more accessible, and in the old days I used to play there at being a sailor on the yard-arms. The tree offered me a perch, rather short, no doubt, but still, well padded. On the upper branches, a relic awaited me, made of cords and rotten planks--the cross-trees! Who would have said that one day I, who used to spy out continents, archipelagoes--phantasies with some likelihood about them--should now be there as a spy for things so fabulously unreal? My glances turned towards the ground. As I have said, the laboratory was composed of a courtyard between two blocks of buildings. The one on the left was pierced with large bay windows on its one story, and on its ground floor. It seemed to me to be merely two large rooms--one above the other. I only saw the higher one, which was elaborately equipped--an apothecary’s cupboard, marble tables covered with bulbs, bottles and retorts, cases (open), sets of polished instruments, and two indescribable pieces of apparatus of glass and nickel, which recalled nothing analogous, except, perhaps, vaguely, the round globes screwed to a stand on which _café_ waiters lay their napkins. The other block which was beyond my range, looked from the outside like an ordinary dwelling-house, and was evidently the place where the two assistants lodged. But, what I had taken for a farmyard on the day of my arrival, took up all my attention. What a miserable farmyard! Its walls were fitted with wire-netted compartments of various sizes, which rose, piled on one another, to an immense height. In these lodges, each duly labeled, rabbits, guinea-pigs, rats, cats and other animals which I could not distinguish because of the distance, moved about painfully, or remained lying, half-hidden under the straw. Some litter, however, was jumping about, but I could not perceive the cause. A nest of mice, I presumed. The last cage on the right served as a hen-house. Contrary to custom, they had locked up the poultry in it.