We dash down the hill and clatter along the sleepy pebbly village street, past the inn full of blouses and billiards, till the trees press thicker and thicker among the lengthening shadows. The forest is full of the peculiar soft beauty that foreruns the summer dusk. These outskirts are fragrant with thorn-trees and acacia-trees. O white-flowering delicate mock-acacias, were I the king of France, I would multiply ye by all my high roads--for none is more beautiful to the eye and none is more majestic or more bountiful than you. Throughout that parched spring of 1893, when the hay stood withered a span high from the ground, your long green leaves served as fodder for our cattle, most succulent and sweet. And what shall I say of your blossom--delicious to every sense--an exquisite rain of white pearls, dropping fragrant perfumes on the tree, which, plucked and delicately fried in batter, make a _beignet_ worthy of Lucullus? I love your black and gnarled thorny trunk, so dark in its veil of lacy green and white; and it always seems to me that the nightingale sings sweeter than elsewhere from your high and twisted branches. Here we are still on the rim of the forest. The white may-trees, still in flower, grow in rounds and rings together on the broken ground studded with silver birch. They stand in the dusky summer stillness, very fair and sweet, their muslin skirt spread white under the gleam of the rising moon. The lanky sentimental young silver birches bend their heads above them, and sigh in the breeze. We pass--and as soon as we have passed, no doubt, they clasp their fragrant partners to their glittering breasts and whirl away in some mystic, pastoral May-dance to celebrate the spring.