botanizing expedition through the countryside.

This friendship, which was not without profit for Fabre (4/29.), was still
more precious to Mill, who found, in the society of the naturalist, a
certain relief from his sorrow. The substance of their conversation was far
from being such as one might have imagined it. Mill was not highly sensible
to the festival of nature or the poetry of the fields. He was hardly
interested in botany, except from the somewhat abstract point of view of
classification and the systematic arrangement of species. Always
melancholy, cold, and distant, he spoke little; but Fabre felt under this
apparent sensibility a rigorous integrity of character, a great capacity
for devotion, and a rare goodness of heart.

So the two wandered across country, each thinking his own thoughts, and
each self-contained as though they were walking on parallel but distant
paths.

However, Fabre was not at the end of his troubles; and secret ill-feeling
began to surround him. The free lectures at Saint-Martial offended the
devout, angered the sectaries, and excited the intolerance of the pedants,
"whose feeble eyelids blink at the daylight," and he was far from
receiving, from his colleagues at the lycée, the sympathy and encouragement
which were, at this moment especially, so necessary to him. Some even went
so far as to denounce him publicly, and he was mentioned one day from the
height of the pulpit, to the indignation of the pupils of the upper Normal
College, as a man at once dangerous and subversive.

Some found it objectionable that this "irregular person, this man of
solitary study," should, by his work and by the magic of his teaching,
assume a position so unique and so disproportionate. Others regarded the