With its peaceful plains, its gracious hills, overgrown with strawberry-tree and ilex, and the sublime mountain of Provence rising upon the horizon, with its varied outlines and its sun-illumined flanks, the Sérignan landscape gently forces itself upon the spectator’s attention. And if the spirit moved him, Fabre had only to raise his head from his apparatus to find all about him something to soothe the eye and refresh the mind. But however keen his feeling for the beauties of Nature, it is not so much as artist or dilettante but as the insect historiographer that he appreciates the value of the landscape, and the wealth of the plains and hills outspread before him. From this point of view the whole surroundings of his hermitage seem as though created to continue and complete the harmas, and the scientific pleasures which this affords him. The Gymnopleuri abound in the pebbly plains of the neighbourhood, where the sheep pass amid the lavender and thyme; and, should we wish to vary the scene of observation, the mountain [99] is but a few hundred steps away, with its tangle of arbutus, rock-roses, and arborescent heather; with its sandy spaces dear to the Bembeces; with its marly slopes exploited by different Wasps and Bees. We have already made mention of the Aygues, and the time has come to pay it a formal visit, as one of the favourite haunts of the Sérignan hermit: The geographers define the Aygues as a watercourse. As an eye-witness I should call it rather a stream of flat pebbles. Understand me: I do not mean that the dry pebbles flow of their own accord; the feeble incline would not permit of such an avalanche. But let it rain: then they will flow. Then, from my home, which is more than a mile distant, I hear the uproar of the clashing pebbles. During the greater part of the year the Aygues is a vast sheet of flat white stones; of the torrent only the bed is left, a furrow of enormous width, comparable to that of its mighty neighbour, the Rhône. When persistent rains fall, when the snows melt on the slopes of the Alps, the dry furrow fills for a few days, complaining, overflowing to a great distance, and displacing, amid the uproar, its pebbly banks. Return a week later: the din of the flood is succeeded by silence. The terrible waters have disappeared, leaving on the banks, as a trace of their brief passage, some wretched muddy puddles quickly drunk up by the sun.