The very mournfulness of the little town is pleasing to me; I love its streets of dark shops, the worn thresholds, and the gardens. In the fine season they seem to float against a background of blue mist which is a confusion of hollyhocks, glycins, trellises; or again they seem patchy as the skin of asses, with drying rags above the hedges of battered boxwood. The tanner's brook drifts by with the pale mother-of-pearl of the sky, and reflects sharply the rooftops amid the slimy plants; the mountain torrent, which hollows the rocks, gleams, twines and flows away. The little place is charming when the grasshopper shrills in the summer's elms and the autumn wind scours it, or when the rains streak it. There is a little public garden that Bernardin de Saint Pierre would have loved; in May the night there is dense, blue, and soft in the chestnut-trees. For years I have lived here, whence my grandfather and a great uncle departed toward the flower-covered Antilles. They listened to the roaring of the sea; robes of muslin glided upon the verandas, and they died perhaps looking back with regret on these streets, these shops, these thresholds, these gardens, this brook, and this mountain torrent. When I go to my little farm I say to myself that this is where they once were. They brought their luncheon in a little basket, and one of them carried a guitar. And young girls surely followed swiftly. Song stirred among the damp hedgerows. An unutterable love frightened the birds, the mulberries were green. They kept time as they walked. A young girl's cry stirred the air, a big hat turned the corner of the road, a clear laugh rose from the rain-torn eglantines; then hearts beat when, in the bright dog-days, the black barns softened the clucking of the hens under the scarlet sky of the south. ...This guitar or another I heard in the courtyard of my Huguenot great-aunts, one summer's evening when I was four years old. The courtyard slept in the white twilight, the roofs shed an unimaginable tenderness upon the climbing rosebushes and the bright paving-stones. Some one sitting on a beam was making merry at the expense of my childhood and my white apron. My great uncle sang some melody from the capital. I can see him again, standing upright with his head thrown back. The air trembled softly. At the end of a roulade he made an exaggerated and charming bow.