passages from Latin authors, I leaned my brow against the pane of my
window which looks on the garden. The garden is not mine, of course,
since I live on the fourth floor; but I have a view of the big weeping-
willow in the centre, the sanded path that runs around it, and the four
walls lined with borders, one of which separates it from the huge
premises of the Carmelites. It is an almost deserted garden. The first-
floor tenant hardly ever walks there. His son, a schoolboy of seventeen,
was there this morning. He stood two feet from the street wall,
motionless, with head thrown back, whistling a monotonous air, which
seemed to me like a signal. Before him, however, was nothing but the
moss on the old wall gleaming like golden lights. People do not whistle
to amuse stones nor yet moss. Farther off, on the other side of the
street, the windows of the opposite houses stretched away in long
straight lines, most of them standing open.

I thought: "The bird is somewhere there. Some small Abigail with her
white cap will look out in a moment."

The suspicion was stupid and ill-natured. How rash are our lightest
judgments! Suddenly the school-boy took one step forward, swept his hand
quickly along the moss as if he were trying to catch a fly, and ran off
to his mother triumphant, delighted, beside himself, with an innocent
gray lizard on the tips of his fingers.

"I've got him! I've got him! He was basking in the sun and I charmed
him!"

"Basking in the sun!" This was a revelation to me. I flung up the
window. Yes, it was true. Warmth and light lay everywhere: on the roofs
still glistening with last night's showers; across the sky, whose gay