Why had father told mother that he was not quite satisfied? On the morning of my first walk with grandfather he was waiting for us at the door on our return. He inspected me, looking me over from head to foot, then, as if resolved, he took my hand and placed it in grandfather’s with a certain solemnity--as a reigning king might do, I thought. “Here is my son,” he said; “I entrust him to you; he holds the future of our house.” Grandfather received the precious trust indifferently, replying in a slightly sarcastic tone, thus at once putting the incident upon an every-day footing: “Don’t worry, Michel; no one is going to rob you of him.” I smiled, standing between the two. How could grandfather rob my father of me? The smallest details of that walk are present with me now. And rightly, so great was its importance in my life. But everything is important when one is little. After a rain the drenched fields seem to draw nearer to one another, and the plants reflect the sunlight from all their pendant drops. My eyes, purged by illness, must have thus shone. “Where are we going, grandfather?” I inclined to the direction of the town, where we should find attractions of all sorts, shops, bazars, show-windows, faces, noise and movement. At the outset we were stopped by the closed gate, the key of which we had forgotten to bring. “Run and get it, child. But why the devil should they barricade the gate?” It was one of Aunt Deen’s thousand precautions; the previous evening, or the one before, she had seen from afar a gipsy waggon, and since then she had been keeping prudent guard over the household. I ran, somewhat scandalised by grandfather’s remark. Wasn’t it necessary to guard the house against enemies? A kingdom has frontiers which must be respected; was it not enough that shadows crossed them every evening in spite of gates and bolts? We are off at last, and grandfather at once turns his back upon the town: “Child, I don’t like towns.” Good-bye to shops and people! We had not walked ten minutes when he took it into his head to leave the highroad, along which we were walking at our ease, quite properly, without hurry, and took a footpath which crossed the fields haphazard. “You’re taking the wrong road, grandfather.” “Not at all. Child, I detest roads!” Well, well! he was more surprising than when he used to come down to the dining-room in his dressing gown and Greek cap. I had always supposed that roads were made to be used, not despised. And besides, how could one get along without them when one went out? The hardly perceptible path which we had taken obliged us to walk single file. I went first, in the capacity of scout. The wheat on one side was already tall, on the other side were oats, quivering on their slender stems. I had learned to know the various grains from our farmer. Wheat and oats soon mingled fraternally before me. “Grandfather, there is no more path.”