(During at least two summers it had been our favorite amusement to build, in isolated nooks, houses like the one described in Robinson Crusoe, and thus hidden away we would sit together and chat.) In the story of the little girl who was bitten by the big creature this phrase, "a very large fruit from the colonies," had suddenly plunged me into a reverie.

And I had a vision of trees, of strange fruits, and of forests filled with marvelously colored birds.

Ah! how much those magical but disturbing words, "the colonies" conveyed to me in my childhood.

To me they meant at that time all tropical and distant countries, which I invariably thought of as filled with giant palms, exquisite flowers, strange black people and great animals.

Although my ideas were so confused I had an almost true conception, amounting to an intuition, of their mournful splendor and their enervating melancholy.
I think that I saw a palm for the first time in an illustrated book called the "Young Naturalists," by Madame Ulliac-Tremadeure; the book was one of my New Year's gifts, and I read some parts of it upon New Year's evening.