There I stand one day, a pensive urchin, with my hands behind my back and my face turned to the sun. The dazzling splendour fascinates me. I am the Moth attracted by the light of the lamp. With what am I enjoying the glorious radiance: with my mouth or my eyes? That is the question put by my budding scientific curiosity. Reader, do not smile! the future observer is already practising and experimenting. I open my mouth wide and close my eyes: the glory disappears. I open my eyes and shut my mouth: the glory reappears. I repeat the performance, with the same result. The question’s solved: I have learnt by deduction that I see the sun with my eyes. What a discovery! That evening I told the whole house all about it. Grandmother smiled fondly at my simplicity: the others laughed at it. ’Tis the way of the world. Another find. At nightfall, amidst the neighbouring bushes, a sort of jingle attracted my attention, sounding very faintly and softly through the evening silence. Who is making that noise? Is it a little bird chirping in his nest? We must look into the matter, and that quickly. True, there is the wolf, who comes out of the woods at this time, so they tell me. Let’s go all the same, but not too far: just there, behind that clump of broom. I stand on the look-out for long, but all in vain. At the faintest sound of movement in the brushwood, the jingle ceases. I try again next day and the day after. This time my stubborn watch succeeds. Whoosh! A grab of my hand and I hold the singer. It is not a bird; it is a kind of Grasshopper whose hind-legs my playfellows have taught me to relish: a poor recompense for my prolonged ambush. The best part of the business is not the two haunches with the shrimpy flavour, but what I have just learnt. I now know, from personal observation, that the Grasshopper sings. I did not publish my discovery for fear of the same laughter that greeted my story about the sun. Oh, what pretty flowers, in a field close to the house! They seem to smile to me with their great violet eyes. Later on I see, in their place, bunches of big red cherries. I taste them. They are not nice, and they have no stones. What can those cherries be? At the end of the summer, grandfather walks up with a spade and turns my field of observation topsy-turvy. From under ground there comes, by the basketful and sackful, a sort of round root. I know that root; it abounds in the house; time after time I have cooked it in the peat-stove. It is the potato. Its violet flower and its red fruit are pigeon-holed in my memory for good and all. With an ever-watchful eye for animals and plants, the future observer, the little six-year-old monkey, practised by himself, all unawares. He went to the flower, he went to the insect, even as the Large White Butterfly goes to the cabbage, and the Red Admiral to the thistle. It would be impossible to describe more delightfully the gradual development of tastes and aptitudes in the dawn of life.