Jouffroy, perhaps with this page in mind, has put tender souls on guard against any belief in the sensibility of plants: let us leave that to the reveries of Pythagoras,--so noble, from other standpoints,--or to the fairy tales, whither we may go of an evening in spring to pluck the rose that speaks. But if he had possessed a more intimate knowledge of nature, and of the relations between insects and plants, what a picture at once admirable and cruel would not Leopardi have been able to draw! Those mosquitoes, upon whom he looks as allies of the caterpillars in ravaging the leaves of some cherry-tree, are ichneumons, and it is the caterpillars themselves that they have come to attack, piercing them with a long, hollow borer which permits the mosquito to lay in the very flesh of the caterpillar eggs which, when they become larvae, will gnaw the living flesh like terrible little vultures. If Leopardi had known this and many another thing,--if he had known that every living creature is in turn prey and depredator, in turn eater and eaten, he would have considered with even greater bitterness the arrival of the new year, which hastens from the very first days of its springtime, to impart full strength and full passion to the instincts of life and devastation. Leopardi despairs: he is, therefore, a weakling. His humble almanac-vendor is made of better clay. He hopes; he wishes to live and live happily; he possesses at least a little of that energy without which other gifts prove only too often to be blemishes and burdens. THE COLORS OF LIFE It was formerly the custom in such provinces as Normandy, for example, or Britanny, to consecrate children to the color blue. The vow was limited to a certain number of years,--seven, fourteen, or twenty-one,--probably because of the virtues of the number seven, as considerable as they are mysterious. Most often the final figure was decided upon,--the age of reason, says the Church, which considers it never too soon to place its hand upon the conscience and the will. It was charming for the little girls, though somewhat monotonous; on the contrary, it was troublesome to the little boys. But it seems the custom was efficacious in warding off the illnesses of childhood, and that it drew to the "consecrated one" the protection of the gods--I mean, of the Virgin--and of the celestial court. The divine personages, inhabiting the sky, which is blue, were in fact seen in blue by the popular imagination, and to adopt their color and assume their livery was to put oneself in the shelter of their power and win their good grace.