At the sight of my laborious and domesticated Professor, who could have believed in his victims, and in a trap which he had laid for me, in the assassination of Klotz, in the distress of Nell? She never ceased her howlings to the stars, suffering from the troubles which I had endured; for she was still there, and it puzzled me that Lerne should continue the punishment of a fault which must appear much less now that Emma no longer interested him. I resolved to confide in my uncle. “Nicolas,” he said, “you have put your finger on my greatest anxiety, but what is to be done? In order to reëstablish the right order of things in this affair, it is absolutely necessary that the body of Macbeth should come back here. By what stratagem are we to persuade his father to send him back? Try to find one. Help me. I promise to act without delay as soon as one or the other of us has found a solution.” This reply had dissipated my last feelings of dislike. I did not ask myself why Lerne had metamorphosed himself so as to give in so easily and quickly. My belief was that the Professor had at last been restored to wisdom; and in default of the other virtues, which would no doubt appear in due order, his rectitude of long ago seemed to me to be born again, rectitude which was as great as the erudition which had never abandoned him, and as evident as _it_ was. And Lerne’s erudition was almost inexhaustible. Each day I was more and more convinced of it. We resumed our walks, and he profited by them to discourse learnedly about everything we came across--a leaf led him on to botany, entomology was suggested by a beetle; a drop of rain let loose upon my admiration a deluge of chemistry, and when we had got to the edge of the forest, I had heard from Lerne’s lips the lecturing of a whole collegeful of dons. But, it was there, at the edge of the woods and fields that one should have seen him. After the last tree had been passed, he never failed to stop, hauled himself up to the top of a boundary stone, and held forth concerning the Universe, in presence of the plains and the heavens. He described things so ingeniously, that one could believe one saw Nature unfold and open to the very depths of the earth, and to the very ends of Infinity. His words knew equally well how to dig into the hills to lay bare the _strata_ of the soil, as to bring near to us, the better to discourse about them, the invisible planets. He knew how to analyze the vapor of the clouds, as well as to show the origin of the cold wind--to evoke prehistoric landscapes, and to prove in the same way the unending future of the countryside. He roamed in spirit with his eyes over the immense panorama, from the hut near at hand, to those wide horizons--the distant tints of blue.