Alphonse Daudet was--especially in youth--the exponent of the south, the south as typified by his native Provence. His was the rich, effusive, impressionable southland nature--abundantly moved upon by all the southern charm and vivacity and naïveté and life, as well as richly gifted in the ability to reproduce those impressions in the pages of his writings. Then what more natural than that he should both personally and in his fiction embody the vivid life of the carefree land? When, in 1869, his first important volume of collected stories appeared, it was seen that into _Letters from My Mill_--which included “The Pope’s Mule”--Daudet had poured not only the young unspoiled richness of his own buoyancy, but also the fulness of his feeling for local landscapes, traditions, and characters of town and country. And again and again, even in his later work, Daudet reverts to the scenes of his boyhood life, and gives us pictures--now jocund as the wine of the country, now sad as a poet’s wail--whose tone and spirit are of the Provençal life, all delicately set in the atmosphere of that sunny clime. In the _History of My Books_, which forms an integral part of the author’s _Thirty Years in Paris_, he takes us by the hand in his dear, intimate way and shows us the great white house, the ancient and unique manor of Montauban. Near by, its shattered wings swaying in the wind on the summit of a little pine-clad mountain, stands _Mon Moulin_--the windmill about whose dusty portals for centuries had gathered the quaint characters of the district, and where, now that its traffic was forever departed, the young Alphonse first began to distinguish man from man in the stories told him by the ancients of the province. “Excellent people, blessed house!” he writes. “How often have I repaired thither in the winter to recuperate in the embrace of nature, to heal myself of Paris and its fevers in the wholesome emanations of our little Provençal hills.” The greetings of old friends at an end, he would whistle to Miracle, a venerable spaniel some fisherman had once found on a bit of wreckage at sea, and climb up to his mill, there to browse and dream and wander in fancy whithersoever the spirits of the place should beckon.