How I loved it! At night, snoozing in my warm bed, I would awesomely
think of it, and how solemn it looked when I had reluctantly left it at
dusk, an hour or two before; then I would picture it to myself, later,
lying deep and cold and still under the stars, in the dark thicket, with
all that weird, uncanny lite seething beneath its stagnant surface.

Then gradually the water would sink, and the reeds, left naked, begin to
move and rustle ominously, and from among their roots in the uncovered
slush everything alive would make for the middle--hopping, gliding,
writhing frantically....

Down shrank the water; and soon in the slimy bottom, yards below, huge
fat salamanders, long-lost and forgotten tadpoles as large as rats,
gigantic toads, enormous flat beetles, all kinds of hairy, scaly, spiny,
blear-eyed, bulbous, shapeless monsters without name, mud-colored
offspring of the mire that had been sleeping there for hundreds of
years, woke up, and crawled in and out, and wallowed and interwriggled,
and devoured each other, like the great saurians and batrachians in my
_Manuel de Geologie Elementaire_. Edition illustree a l'usage des
enfants. Par Jules Saindou, Bachelier et Maitre es Lettres et
es Sciences.

Then would I wake up with a start, in a cold perspiration, an icy chill
shooting through me that roughed my skin and stirred the roots of my
hair, and ardently wish for to-morrow morning.

In after-years, and far away among the cold fogs of Clerkenwell, when
the frequent longing would come over me to revisit "the pretty place of
my birth," it was for the Mare d'Auteuil I longed the most; _that_ was
the loadstar, the very pole of my home-sick desires; always thither the