It was a hot and cloudless September afternoon. The old garden, silent and melancholy as ever, gave me, strangely enough, more than the customary feeling of regret that I was so far away from my mother, that all of summer would pass without my seeing my home and the flowers in the beloved little yard. And then, too, what I was upon the point of writing would result in separating me farther from all that I loved, and for that reason I felt extraordinarily sad. It seemed to me that there was something a little funereal in the air of the garden, as if the walls, the plum trees, the vine-covered bower, even the very alfalfa fields beyond the garden, were vitally interested in this, the first grave act of my life which was about to take place under their eyes. For the purpose of writing I hesitated between two or three places, all blazing hot and almost shadeless. It was my way of gaining time, an attempt to delay writing that letter which, with the ideas I then had, would render my decision, once I had announced it, irrevocable. The sun-baked earth was already strewn with red vine branches and withered leaves; the holly-hocks and dahlias, grown tall as trees, had a few meagre blossoms at the tops of their long stalks; the blazing sun perfected and turned to gold the musk-scented grapes that always ripened a little late; but in spite of the excessive heat and the exquisite limpid blue of the sky one felt that summer was over. I finally selected the arbor at the end of the garden for my purpose. Its vines were stripped of their leaves, but the steel-blue butterflies and the wasps still came and posted themselves upon the tendrils of the grape-vines. There in the calm and tranquil solitude, in the summer-like silence filled with the musical chirp of insects, I wrote and timidly signed my compact with the sea. Of the letter itself I remember very little; but I recall distinctly the emotion with which I enclosed it in its envelope--I felt as if I had forever sealed my destiny.