‘Vaqui la flou, vaqui lou pécou: here is the flower, here is the tail.’ she said, showing Favier the two ends of her fruit. Favier roared with laughter: ‘It’s a Sea-urchin.’ he said, ‘a Sea-chestnut; I’ve eaten them at Constantinople!’ And he explained as best he could what a Sea-urchin is. The woman did not understand a word of what he said and persisted in her contention. She was convinced that Favier was deceiving her, jealous at the thought that such precious seeds should reach me through any other intermediary than him. The issue was submitted to me. ‘Vaqui la flou, vaqui lou pécou,’ repeated the good woman. I told her that the flou was the cluster formed by the Urchin’s five white teeth and that the pécou was the antipodes of the mouth. She went away only half convinced. It may be that, at this moment, the seeds of the fruit, grains of sand rattling in the empty shell, are germinating in some old broken-mouthed pipkin. Favier, therefore, knows many things; and he knows them more particularly through having eaten them. He knows the virtues of a Badger’s back, the toothsome qualities of the leg of a Fox; he is an expert as to the best part of that Eel of the bushes, the Snake; he has browned in oil the Eyed Lizard, the ill-famed Rassade of the South; he has thought-out the recipe of a fry of Locusts. I am astounded at the impossible stews which he has concocted during his cosmopolitan career. I am no less surprised at his penetrating eye and his memory for things. I have only to describe some plant, which to him is but a nameless weed, devoid of the least interest; and, if it grows in our woods, I feel pretty sure that he will bring it to me and tell me the spot where I can pick it for myself. The botany of the infinitesimal even does not foil his perspicacity. To complete my already-published work on the Sphæriaceæ of Vaucluse, I resume my patient herborizing with the lens during the bad weather, the insect’s slack time. When the frost hardens the ground, when the rains reduce it to slush, I take Favier away from his work in the garden to scour the woods with me; and there, in the tangle of some bramble-bush, we hunt together for those microscopic growths which speckle with black dots the tiny branches strewn all over the soil. He calls the largest species ‘gunpowder,’ an accurate expression which has already been used by the botanists to describe one of those Sphæriaceæ. He feels quite proud of his bunch of discoveries, which is richer than mine. When he lights upon a magnificent rosellinia, a mass of black pustules wrapped in a purplish down, we smoke a pipe to celebrate the joyous occasion.