herbage as he could find while his master was getting ready another
load of wood. The man was an old soldier, who had seen some rough
service, for he was at Sedan, and was afterwards engaged in the
ghastly business of shooting down his own countrymen in Paris. But,
with all this, he was as quiet a tempered creature as his donkey,
which he treated as a friend. The army, he told me, was the best
school for learning how to treat a beast with proper consideration.

I asked why.

'Because,' replied he, 'when a soldier is caught beating a horse, he
has eight days of _salle de police_.'

Man and donkey having disappeared into a wood, my next companion was a
small blue butterfly that kept a few yards in front of me, now
stopping to look at a flower, now fluttering on again. Some insects,
as well as certain birds, appear to derive much entertainment from
watching the movements of that fantastic animal--man.

Arcadian leafiness: rocky desolation befitting the mouth of hell.
Grass and flowers on which souls might tread in the paradise of the
Florentine poet. Stony forms, monstrous, enigmatic, reared like
symbolic tokens of defeated gods, or of the worn-out evil passions
that troubled old creation before the coming of man, and the fresh
order of spiritual and carnal bewilderment. Why should I go on and
seek further amazement, while from the lowest to the highest I can
read not one of the mystic figures of the solitude around me? What is
my relation to them, and theirs to me? Why should that beetle in the
grass, upon whose back all the colours of the prism change and glow
like supernatural fire, trouble me with the cause and motive of its