the Rue Neuve, heaped together like eggs. These people are loaded with
provisions. At the farther end, square-paved, one picks out swarthy
outlines of the Epinal type, and faces as brightly colored as apples.
Groups of children flutter and chirrup; little girls with their dolls
play at being mothers, and little boys play at brigands. Respectable
people take their stand more ceremoniously than the common crowd, and
talk business piously.

Farther away is the road, which April's illumination adorns all along
the lines of trees with embroidery of shadow and of gold, where
bicycles tinkle and carriages rumble echoingly; and the shining
river,--those long-drawn sheets of water, whereon the sun spreads
sheets of light and scatters blinding points. Looking along the road,
on either side of its stone-hard surface, one sees the pleasant,
cultivated earth, the bits of land sewn to each other, and many-hued,
brown or green as the billiard cloth, then paling in the distance.
Here and there, on this map in colors, copses bulge forth. The
by-roads are pricked out with trees, which follow each other artlessly
and divide the infantile littleness of orchards.

This landscape holds us by the soul. It is a watercolor now (for it
rained a little last night), with its washed stones, its tiles
varnished anew, its roofs that are half slate and half light, its
shining pavements, water-jeweled in places, its delicately blue sky,
with clouds like silky paper; and between two house-fronts of yellow
ocher and tan, against the purple velvet of distant forests, there is
the neighboring steeple, which is like ours and yet different. Roundly
one's gaze embraces all the panorama, which is delightful as the
rainbow.