retains, giving it the first place in his modest library, in memory of his
early joys and emotions.

The rocks also arrested and captivated his attention: and already the first
volumes were corpulent of what was eventually to become his gigantic
herbiary. His brother, about to leave for Vezins on vacation, was told of
the specimens which he wanted to complete his collection; for although he
had never set foot there since his first departure, he recalled, with
remarkable precision, all the plants that grew in his native countryside;
their haunts, their singularities, and the characteristics by which one
could not fail to recognize them: as well as all the places which they
chose by preference, where he used to wander as an urchin; the Parnassia
palustris, "which springs up in the damp meadows, below the beech-wood to
the west of the village; which bears a superb white flower at the top of a
slightly twisted stem, having an oval leaf about its middle"; the purple
digitalis, "whose long spindles of great red flowers, speckled with white
inside, and shaped like the fingers of a glove," border a certain road; all
the ferns that grow on the wastes, "amid which it is often no easy task to
recollect one's whereabouts," and on the arid hills all the heathers, pink,
white, and bluish, with different foliage, "of which the innumerable
species do not, however, very greatly differ." Nothing is to be neglected;
"every plant, whatever it may be, great or little, rare or common, were it
only a frond of moss, may have its interest." (2/5.)

Never weary of work, he accumulated all these treasures in his little
museum, in order to study them the better; he collected all the coins
exhumed from this ancient soil, formerly Roman, "records of humanity more
eloquent than books," and which revealed to him the only method of learning
and actually re-living history: for he saw in knowledge not merely a means
of gaining his bread, but "something nobler; the means of raising the