Bounded on three sides by the forest (now shorn away), it was just hidden from the dusty road by a fringe of trees; and one could have it all to one's self, except on Sunday and Thursday afternoons, when a few love-sick Parisians remembered its existence, and in its loveliness forgot their own. To be there at all was to be happy; for not only was it quite the most secluded, picturesque, and beautiful pond in all the habitable globe--that pond of ponds, the _only_ pond--but it teemed with a far greater number and variety of wonderful insects and reptiles than any other pond in the world. Such, at least, I believed must be the case, for they were endless. To watch these creatures, to learn their ways, to catch them (which we sometimes did), to take them home and be kind to them, and try to tame them, and teach them our ways (with never varying non-success, it is true, but in, oh, such jolly company!) became a hobby that lasted me, on and off, for seven years. La Mare d'Auteuil! The very name has a magic, from all the associations that gathered round it during that time, to cling forever. How I loved it! At night, snoozing in my warm bed, I would awesomely think of it, and how solemn it looked when I had reluctantly left it at dusk, an hour or two before; then I would picture it to myself, later, lying deep and cold and still under the stars, in the dark thicket, with all that weird, uncanny lite seething beneath its stagnant surface. Then gradually the water would sink, and the reeds, left naked, begin to move and rustle ominously, and from among their roots in the uncovered slush everything alive would make for the middle--hopping, gliding, writhing frantically.... Down shrank the water; and soon in the slimy bottom, yards below, huge fat salamanders, long-lost and forgotten tadpoles as large as rats, gigantic toads, enormous flat beetles, all kinds of hairy, scaly, spiny, blear-eyed, bulbous, shapeless monsters without name, mud-colored offspring of the mire that had been sleeping there for hundreds of years, woke up, and crawled in and out, and wallowed and interwriggled, and devoured each other, like the great saurians and batrachians in my _Manuel de Geologie Elementaire_. Edition illustree a l'usage des enfants. Par Jules Saindou, Bachelier et Maitre es Lettres et es Sciences. Then would I wake up with a start, in a cold perspiration, an icy chill shooting through me that roughed my skin and stirred the roots of my hair, and ardently wish for to-morrow morning.