dull as dun-colored little bats.

As soon as my eyes rested upon it I seemed to hear drawled out lazily,
in a mountaineer's treble, the refrain: "Ah! ah! the good, good story!"
And again I saw the white porch of Bories in the midst of the silence
and the hot sunshine of a summer noon. A deep regret for past and
gone vacations took possession of me; I felt saddened when I tried to
recreate days belonging to a dead past, and tried to imagine vacations
still to come; but mingled in with sentiments that I can name, there
were those other inexpressible ones that well up from the unfathomable
deeps of one's being.

This association between the butterfly, the song and Bories caused me
for a long time an extreme sadness that, try as hard as I may, I cannot
explain satisfactorily; and the feeling continued until stormy and
tempestuous winds swept over my life and carried away with them the
small concerns belonging to my childhood.

Sometimes, upon gray winters evenings, when I looked at the butterfly
I would sing to myself the little refrain of the "good, good story;" to
accomplish this I had to make my voice very flute-like; and as I sang,
the porch of Bories appeared to me more vividly than ever, as it stood,
sunny but desolate, under the dazzling light of the September noon. This
association was a little like the one that later established itself for
me between the sad falsetto of the Arab songs, the snowy splendor of
their mosques and the winding-sheet whiteness of their lime-washed
porticos.

That butterfly in all the freshness and radiance of its two strange
colors, mummified, it is true, but as brilliant looking as ever under