called weariness of life. It is a terrible malady, and those who have
fallen prey to it are unable to look upon men, animals, and things
without frightful suffering. Great scruples poison his heart.

The poet went away from the town where he dwelled. He sought out the
fields to gaze at the trees and the corn and the waters, to listen to
the quails that sing like fountains and to the falling of the weavers'
looms and the hum of the telegraph wires. These things and these
sounds saddened him.

The gentlest thoughts were bitterness to him. And when he picked a
little flower in order to escape his terrible malady, he wept because
he had plucked it.

He entered a village on an evening sweet with the perfume of pears.
It was a beautiful village like those he had often described in his
books. There was a town square, a church, a cemetery, gardens, a
smithy, and a dark inn. Blue smoke rose from it, and within was the
sheen of glasses. There was also a stream which wound in and out under
the wild nut-trees.

The poet with his sick heart sat down mournfully on a stone. He was
thinking of the torment he was enduring, of his old mother crying
because of his absence, of the women who had deceived him, and he had
homesickness for the time of his first communion.

"My heart," he thought, "my sad heart cannot change."

Suddenly he saw a young peasant-girl near by gathering her geese under
the stars. She said to him: