There are beds with box-borders in that garden; there are pear-trees reputed to give pears, real pears, more or less good to eat when they have ripened on the straw all through the late autumn. In our imagination, it is a spot of perpetual delight, a paradise, but a paradise seen the wrong way up: instead of contemplating it from below, we gaze at it from above. How happy they must be with so much space and all those pears! We look at the hives, around which the hovering Bees make a sort of russet smoke. They stand under the shelter of a great hazel. The tree has sprung up all of itself in a fissure of the wall, almost on the level of our currant-bushes. While it spreads its mighty branches over the notary’s hives, its roots, at least, are in our soil. It belongs to us. The trouble is to gather the nuts. I creep along astride the strong branches projecting horizontally into space. If I slip, or if the support breaks, I shall come to grief in the midst of the angry Bees. I do not slip, and the support does not break. With the crooked stick which my brother hands me, I bring the finest clusters within my reach. I soon fill my pockets. Moving backwards, still straddling my branch, I recover terra firma. O wondrous days of litheness and assurance, when, for a few filberts, on a perilous perch we braved the abyss! [18] I confess I love this little sketch of the garden, which gives evidence of a singular clearness of perception in the gaze which this child already turns upon the things about him. But I like still better the history of the duck-pond, graceful as an idyll and touching as an elegy, the idyll of a rustic childhood which becomes aware, simultaneously, of the family secrets and the secrets of nature; the elegy of a father’s tenderness and a son’s piety cramped and mortified by poverty, the elegy of intelligence, nay, of genius, ready to spread its wings and fettered in its flight by the heavy chains and harsh necessities of material existence: How shall a man earn his living in my poor native village, with its inclement weather and its niggardly soil? The owner of a few acres of grazing-land rears sheep. In the best parts, he scrapes the soil with the swing-plough; he flattens it into terraces banked by walls of broken stones. Pannierfuls of dung are carried up on donkey-back from the cowshed. Then, in due season, comes the excellent potato, which, boiled and served hot in a basket of plaited straw, is the chief stand-by in winter.