Henri Fabre was then fifty-five years of age, and apparently broken by fatigue and suffering. This did not prevent him from undertaking and accomplishing a task in which we know not which to admire the most: the acuteness of observation or the vigour of thought, the enthusiasm of the investigator or the animation of the writer. Here is a wonderful example to all those whom advancing age and life have already cruelly bruised; to all those who might be tempted to give up or to flinch under the burden of grief or disappointment, instead of listening to the voice of their talents, the appeal of their friends, the summons of God Himself to generous and devoted action, and to the great harvest of souls and ideas. For forty years [says Fabre] I have struggled with unshakable courage against the sordid miseries of life; and the corner of earth I have dreamed of has come at last. The wish is realised. It is a little late, O my pretty insects! I greatly fear that the peach is offered to me when I am beginning to have no teeth wherewith to eat it. Yes, it is a little late; the wide horizons of the outset have shrunk into a low and stifling canopy, more and more straitened day by day. Regretting nothing in the past, save those whom I have lost; regretting nothing, not even my first youth; hoping nothing either, I have reached the point at which, worn out by the experience of things, we ask ourselves if life be worth the living. [152] In the touching, desolate accents of these lives we may, no doubt, hear the echoes of a whole lifetime of toil and trial; but above all they express the cruel grief which had just wrung the kindly, tender heart of the great scientist. He was still suffering from the blow dealt him by the death of his beloved son Jules at the moment of writing these lines on the first page of the second volume of the Souvenirs, piously dedicated to the memory of the lost child. Happily he found in his “insuperable faith in the Beyond” [153] a the courage to overcome his grief and in his “love of scientific truth” the possibility of taking up his life again and resuming his work.