And yet no! Alone among living creatures man has the thirst for knowledge; he alone pries into the mysteries of things. The least among us will utter his whys and his wherefores, a fine pain unknown to the brute beast. If these questionings come from us with greater persistence, with a more imperious authority, if they divert us from the quest of lucre, life’s only object in the eyes of most men, does it behove us to complain? Let us be careful not to do so, for that would be denying the best of all our gifts. Let us strive, on the contrary, within the measure of our capacity, to force a gleam of light from the vast unknown; let us examine and question and, here and there, wrest a few shreds of truth. We shall sink under the task; in the present ill-ordered state of society, we shall end, perhaps, in the workhouse. Let us go ahead for all that: our consolation shall be that we have increased by one atom the general mass of knowledge, the incomparable treasure of mankind. As this modest lot has fallen to me, I will return to the pond, notwithstanding the wise admonitions and the bitter tears which I once owed to it. I will return to the pond, but not to that of the small ducks, the pond aflower with illusions: those ponds do not occur twice in a lifetime. For luck like that, you must be in all the new glory of your first breeches and your first ideas. Many another have I come upon since that distant time, ponds very much richer and, moreover, explored with the ripened eye of experience. Enthusiastically I searched them with the net, stirred up their mud, ransacked their trailing weeds. None in my memories comes up to the first, magnified in its delights and mortifications by the marvellous perspective of the years. [20] His excursions to the pond and the garden were little more to our little Jean-Henri than the preface to rather more distant excursions in the neighbourhood of Saint-Léons. The edge of the brook, the crest of the hill and the skirts of the beechwood which limit his horizon are the chosen spots to which his curiosity leads him, and the favourite scene of his childish rambles. It is really delightful to watch him taking possession of these unknown territories and making the first inventory of the wealth that he will explore later on.