In preceding chapters I have not said much about that Limoise which was the scene of my initiation into nature and its wonders.

My entire childhood is intimately connected with that little corner of the world, with its ancient forests of oak trees, and its rocky moorlands covered here and there with a carpet of wild thyme and heather.
For ten or twelve glorious summers I went there to spend my Thursday holidays, and I dreamed of it during the dreary intervening days of study.
In May our friends the D-----s and Lucette went to their country home and remained until vintage time, usually until after the first October frost,--and regularly every Wednesday evening I was taken there.
Nothing in my estimation was so delightful as that journey to Limoise.
We scarcely ever went in a carriage, for it was not more than three and a half miles distant; to me, however, it seemed very far, almost lost in the woods.

It lay toward the south, in the direction of those distant, sunny lands I loved to think of.

(I would have found it less charming had it been towards the north.) Every Wednesday evening, at sunset, the hour therefore varying with the month, I left home accompanied by Lucette's elder brother, a grown boy of eighteen or twenty, who seemed to me a man of mature age.

As far as I was able I tried to keep pace with him, and, in consequence, I was obliged to go more rapidly than when I walked with my father and sister; we went through the quiet streets lying near the ramparts, and passed the sailors' old barracks, the sounds of whose bugles and drums reached as far as my attic museum when the south wind blew; then we passed through the fortifications by the most ancient of its gray gates,--a gate almost abandoned, and used now principally by peasants with flocks of sheep and droves of cattle,--and finally we arrived at the road that led to the river.
A mile and a half of straight road stretched before us, and this path lay between stunted old trees yellow with lichens whose branches were blown to the left by the force of the sea-winds that almost constantly came from the west, sweeping over the broad and level meadows that lay between us and the ocean.
To those who have a conventionalized idea of country beauty, and to whom a charming landscape means a river winding its way between poplars, or a mountain crowned by an old castle, this level road would look very ugly.
But I found it exquisite in spite of its straight lines.