The crow, adjusting one eye on me as the clock-maker does on his watch, would see me, a precise, miniature person--a cane like a dart between my fingers--advancing by the straight footpath, moving briskly along. The country, between the mountains that enclose it, is as flat as the bottom of a frying-pan. To right and left the work of harvesting goes on; they shear the earth as if it were a sheep. I dispute the width of the path, and my place on it, with an uninterrupted file of workers; those who are going to the fields, spade at belt; those who are returning, bending like scales under the weight of double baskets whose form is at once round and square, joining the symbols of the earth and the sky. I walk a long time; the open air is as close as a room, the sky is somber, and the long columns of stagnant smoke are stationary like the remains of some barbaric pyre. I leave the shorn rice-fields and the harvest-fields of slime; and, little by little, I mount the narrowing gorge. Useless reeds succeed the fields of sugar-cane; and three times, with shoes in hands, I cross the rapid waters gathered into the current of a river. I have undertaken to find the source of one of these streams that feed the river, here, where it arises in the heart of a five-gorged valley. The ascent becomes more difficult as the thread of the cascade extends. I leave beneath me the last field of potatoes, and, all at once, I have entered into a wood like that which on Parnassus served for the assembly of the Muses! All about me the tea-plants lift their distorted shoots and their dry, somber foliage,--so high that my stretched hand cannot reach it. Charming retreat! Quaint and mysterious shadow, enameled with a perpetual flowering! A delicate perfume, which seems to survive rather than emanate, flatters the nostril while recreating the spirit. And in a hollow I discover the spring! Like grain out of a furious hopper the water from beneath the earth bursts forth, leaping and bubbling. Impurities are absorbed. Only that which is pure, untainted at the source, leaps out. Born of the roseate sky (gathered in what profound matrix!) the virgin water, with living force, pours from the opening like a cry. Happy those from whom a new word bursts with violence! May my mouth be supplied forever like this spring,--which, sustained by a perpetual, solitary renewal, cares not that it must serve for the works of Man,--for those lowlands where, spreading wide and inundating the tilth, it will nourish the vast, stagnant harvest-fields. THE TIDE AT NOON When the time comes that he can sail no longer, the mariner makes his home near the sea; and when it moans he rises to watch, unable to sleep longer; like a nurse who hears a little child complain in the night. I do likewise, and, by the living virtue of the sea in my blood, my mind communicates with the movement of the waters as does a city by its secret drains.