It appears, from all this, that our eyes are uncertain. Two persons look at the same clock and there is a difference of two or three minutes in their reading of the time. One has a tendency to put back the hands, the other to advance them. Let us not too confidently try to play the part of the third person who wishes to set the first two aright; it may well happen that we are mistaken in turn. Besides, in our daily life, we have less need of certainty than of a certain approximation to certainty. Let us learn how to see, but without looking too closely at things and men: they look better from a distance. THE RIVERS OF FRANCE A river is a beautiful thing. It runs along, its sings, it laughs, it glints in the sunlight and becomes darker beneath the trees. Sometimes one may see the bottom, where there are stones and grasses, while at times it is a sombre abyss that fills one with shudders. The river comes from afar and goes no one knows whither. True, people say that it has a beginning and that its source lies yonder, in the mountains, but that is not at all so certain. What is a source? When you see a river, it is already a river and it never occurs to you that it may ever have been only a tiny ribbon of water trickling down from a rock. In olden days, when the world was happy, things were far different. Rivers flowed from a marble pitcher which was held in the hands of an eternally youthful, drooping maiden. But the wicked god of the Christians, who is not fond of maidens? beauty, broke those marble pitchers; the mothers of rivers died of grief and now the rivers are born by accident, as best they may be. If we are not so well informed about their birth, we know their life and their death. Their life is to bound along or to flow nonchalantly on, to prattle over the pebbles and dream amid the rushes. Often, when traversing the blooming meadows they love to spread across the grass. If dikes or tree-trunks bar the way they are provoked and even wax furious. But if it is a mill that rises before them, they turn its wheels with docile promptness, and continue on their way unperturbed. The river is the mother of men and trees, of beasts and plants. Without the river there are no fish; there are no birds. There are no crops, no flowers, no wine, no cattle, and man flees, parched by the sun. After having given life, the river has two ways of dying; either it expands into the bosom of a larger river or flows directly to mingle with the sea; the sea is the vast cemetery of all the rivers,--of the smallest as well as the greatest. But the river that dies is nevertheless just as eternal as the ocean that receives it into its depths. The clouds are born of the sea, and the wind wafts them toward the forests, where they make rain and swell the streams. There is in the world a circulation of water as in our bodies there is a circulation of blood. All this is well regulated. The sea loves the river. It comes to meet the stream and sends it as greeting