Has it ever happened to you, when you were walking alone and in contemplative mood, to lie flat on your face in the grassy underbrush of a forest, amid the peculiar vegetation, of many and varying species, that grows between the fallen autumn leaves, and to let your eyes stray along the level of the earth before you? Gradually the idea of height vanishes, the interlaced branches of the oaks above your head form an inaccessible sky, and you see a new forest stretching out beneath the other, opening its long avenues pierced by a mysterious green light and lined by slender or tufted shrubs ending in round tops of exotic or wild aspect, stalks of sugar-cane, the graceful rigidity of palms, slender cups holding a drop of water, girandoles bearing little yellow lights which flicker in the passing breeze. And the miraculous feature of it all is that beneath those slender stalks live miniature plants and myriads of insects whose existence, seen at such close quarters, reveals all its mysteries to you. An ant, staggering like a woodcutter under his burden, drags a piece of bark larger than himself; a beetle crawls along a blade of grass stretched like a bridge from trunk to trunk; while, beneath a tall fern standing by itself in a clearing carpeted with velvety moss, some little blue or red creature waits, its antennae on the alert, until some other beast, on its way thither by some deserted path, arrives at the rendezvous under the gigantic tree. It is a small forest beneath the large one, too near the ground for the latter to perceive it, too humble, too securely hidden to be reached by its grand orchestra of songs and tempests. A similar phenomenon takes place in the Bois de Boulogne. Behind those neat, well-watered gravelled paths, where long lines of wheels moving slowly around the lake draw a furrow by constant wear throughout the day, with the precision of a machine, behind that wonderful stage-setting of verdure-covered walls, of captive streams, of flower-girt rocks, the real forest, the wild forest, with its luxuriant underbrush, advances and recedes, forming impenetrable shadows traversed by narrow paths and rippling brooks. That is the forest of the lowly, the forest of the humble, the little forest under the great. And Paul, who knew nothing of the aristocratic resort save the long avenues, the gleaming lake as seen from the back seat of a carriage or from the top of a break in the dust of a return from Longchamps, was amazed to see the deliciously secluded nook to which his friends escorted him. It was on the edge of a pond that lay mirrorlike beneath the willows, covered with lilies and lentils, with great patches of white here and there, where the sun's rays fell upon the gleaming surface, and streaked with great tendrils of _argyronetes_ as with lines drawn by diamond points.