“The mill was a ruin,” he says; “a crumbling mass of stone, iron, and ancient boards which had not turned in the wind for many years, and which lay, with broken limbs, as useless as a poet, while all around on the hillside the miller’s trade prospered and ground and ground with all its wings. Strange affinities subsist between ourselves and inanimate objects. From the first day, that cast-off structure was dear to my heart; I loved it for its desolation, its road overgrown with weeds, those little grayish, fragrant mountain weeds with which Père Gaucher compounded his elixir; for its little worn platform where it was so pleasant to loiter, sheltered from the wind, while a rabbit hurried by, or a long snake, rustling among the leaves with crafty detours, hunted the field mice with which the ruin swarmed. With the creaking of the old building shaken by the north wind, the flapping of its wings like the rigging of a ship at sea, the mill stirred in my poor, restless, nomadic brain memories of journeys by sea, of landings at lighthouses and far-off islands; and the shivering swell all about completed the illusion. I know not whence I derived this taste for wild and desert places which has characterized me from my childhood, and which seems so inconsistent with the exuberance of my nature, unless it be at the same time the physical need of repairing by a fast from words, by abstinence from outcries and gestures, the terrible waste which the southerner makes of his whole being. Be that as it may, I owe a great deal to those places of refuge for the mind; and no one of them has been more salutary in its effect upon me than that old mill in Provence.” Here, both in boyhood and in young manhood’s revisitations, Daudet found the “grasshopper’s library,” and in its secret alcoves discovered such delightful stories as “The Elixir of the Reverend Father Gaucher,” “The Three Low Masses,” “The Goat of Monsieur Seguin,” “Master Cornille’s Secret,” and “The Old Folks,” all abounding in naïve character and told with his own delicate charm. Here, too, he learned to take a delight in his craft which waned not with the years; and to find joy in pleasing “the people,” who were ever the subjects of his finest delineations.