[Picture: Robert plodding back with the bucket] * * * * * [Picture: Robert breakfasting on the lawn] _September_ 10_th_. . . . I had just finished breakfasting on the lawn—on my word, an excellent breakfast too!—fresh eggs, and grapes gathered from my beautiful purple vine. I was sitting there, idly dreaming, basking in the light, warmth, and silence, very busy looking at the smoke of my pipe and at my painted plates, on which a stray wasp was furiously attacking the emptied stalks. Around me on that clear autumn day, under a deep and pure blue sky, even more beautiful than the summer skies so often veiled and dimmed by hot mists, I felt the same hush of Nature, the same all-pervading sense of peace . . . When suddenly a formidable explosion in my immediate vicinity shook the house, rattled the windows, and stirred the leaves, sending forth on all sides the sound of wild flutterings, screams, alarms, and galloping . . . This time it was not the bridge at Corbeil that was blown up, but our own, our little bridge at Champrosay. It meant: “The Prussians are here!” Immediately my heart stood still, and a veil seemed to pass over the sunlight. Then the thought crossed my mind that to-morrow, this evening maybe, the forest roads would be invaded, darkened by these wretches; that I should be compelled to bury myself alive, and never stir out again. And I longed to see once more my beloved forest, of which I had been deprived for the last two months. The lanes in the woods were lovely, widened by freedom from the long summer weeds, and showing at the top, through the young branches, a long ray of light. At the cross-roads, bathed in sunlight, the faded pink heather was flowering in tufts; and in the thickets, among the black stems, like a small forest beneath a large one, the ferns displayed their microscopic trees with their peculiar foliage. What a silence! Generally a thousand vague sounds greeted me from afar: the trains passing by and marking the distant horizon, the digging of the quarrymen, the cart-wheels slowly turning in the ruts, the strident call-whistle of the gang. And to-day, not a sound—not even that perpetual murmur which seems like the breathing of a slumbering forest—that stir of the leaves, that humming of the insects, that pretty “_frrrt_!” like the unfolding of a fan, made by birds among the foliage. It seemed as if the loud report just now had stupefied all Nature.