I also had a great admiration, less justified perhaps, for some lines from Virgil. Since the beginning of the Ecloque I had, with the greatest interest, followed the two shepherds as they made their way across the fields of ancient Rome. I could picture it to myself so vividly, those Roman meadows of two thousand years ago: hot, a little sterile, with thickets of almost petrified shrubs, and evergreen oaks like the stony moorland of Limoise, where I had experienced precisely the pastoral charm that I discovered in this description of a past time. Onward went the two shepherds, and suddenly, they perceived that their journey was half over, “because the tomb of Bianor was immediately below them . . .” Oh! how vividly I saw that tomb of Bianor disclose itself to their view. Its old stones, that made a white blot on the reddish road, were covered with tiny sun-scorched plants, wild thyme or marjoram, and here and there grew stunted dark foliaged shrubs. And the sonority of the word Bianoris with which the sentence ended suddenly and magically evoked for me the musical humming of the insects that buzzed around the two travellers who, upon that bygone day in June, walked onward in the great silence and serene tranquillity of the hot noon enkindled by a younger sun. I was no longer in the schoolroom; I was in the meadows with the shepherds walking with them this radiant summer day through the sun-scorched flowers and grass of a Roman field,--but still all seemed softened and vague as if looked at through a telescope that had the power to draw into its line of vision ages long past. Who knows? Perhaps if the Big Ape could but have divined the causes that led to my momentary inattention it might have brought about an understanding between us. CHAPTER LXVI. One Thursday evening at Limoise, just before the inevitable hour for my departure, I went up alone to the large, old room on the second floor in which I slept. First I leaned out of the open window to watch the July sun sink behind the stony fields and fern heaths that lay towards the sea, which though very near us was invisible. These sunsets at the end of my Thursday holidays always overwhelmed me with melancholy. During the last minutes of my stay I felt a desire, one I had never known before, to rummage in the old Louis XV bookcase that stood near my bed. There among the volumes in their century-old bindings, where the worms, never disturbed, slowly bored their galleries, I found a book made of thick rough old-fashioned paper, and this I opened carelessly. . . . In it I read, with a thrill of emotion, that from noon until four o'clock in the afternoon, on the 20th of June, 1813, south of the equator, in longitude 110 and latitude 15 (between the tropics, consequently, and in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean) there was fair weather, a beautiful sea, a fine southeast breeze, and in the sky many little clouds called “cat-tails,” and that alongside the ship dolphins were passing.