Like a blue flood the marvelous cone-like trees, interwoven with silvery lichens, stretched upward. Waterfalls as if suspended from the rocky crags, scattered in a smoke-like spray. And suddenly the heavenly flocks sent forth their bleating toward God, and the ecstatic bells wept for the shadow of the ferns. And the dark water of the grottoes broke in the light. Lying amid the wild laurel the lamb of the Gospel became visible again. Its paw rested under its nose, and was still bleeding. The roads over which it had passed had been hard, but soon it would be fully restored by the slightly acid sweetness of the myrtles. Even now it was quivering as it listened to its scattered companions. On entering this Paradise to dwell therein the sheep of Francis saw the lamb of Jean de la Fontaine amid the forget-me-nots which were of the mirror-like color of the waves. It no longer disputed with the wolf of the fable. It drank, and the water did not become turbid thereat. The untamed spring over which the two hundred year old ivy seemed to have thrown a shadow of bitterness, streamed on amid the grass with its broken waves in which were mirrored the snowy tremblings of the lamb. And high on the slopes of the _happy valleys_ they saw the sheep of those heroes that Cervantes tells about, all of whom were sick at heart for the love of one and the same girl and left their city to lead the life of shepherds in a far-away country. These sheep had the gentlest of voices, like hearts that secretly love their own sufferings. They drank from the wild thyme the always new, burning tears which their bucolic poets had let fall like dew from the cups of their eyes. At the horizon of this Paradise there rose a confused murmur like that of the Ocean. It consisted of the broken sobbing of flutes or clarinets, of cries reechoed from the abysses, of the baying of restless dogs, and of the fall of a moss-covered stone into the void. It was the tumult of the waterfalls high above the noise of the torrents. It was like the voice of a people on the march toward the promised land, toward the grapes without name, toward the fiery spikes of grain; and mingled with this sound was the braying of pregnant she-asses, that were laden with heavy containers of milk and the mantles of the herdsmen and salt and cheeses which were brittle like chalk. * * * * * The fourth Paradise in its almost indescribable barrenness was that of the wolves.