paper from its heading to the last advertisement, the everlasting game of dominoes no sooner finished than renewed, the same walk at the self-same hour and ever along the same roads—­all that brutifies the mind, like a grindstone crushing the brain, filled them with indignation, called forth their protestations.  They preferred to scale the neighbouring hills in search of some unknown solitary spot, where they declaimed verses even amidst drenching showers, without dreaming of shelter in their very hatred of town-life.  They had even planned an encampment on the banks of the Viorne, where they were to live like savages, happy with constant bathing, and the company of five or six books, which would amply suffice for their wants.  Even womankind was to be strictly banished from that camp.  Being very timid and awkward in the presence of the gentler sex, they pretended to the asceticism of superior intellects.  For two years Claude had been in love with a ’prentice hat-trimmer, whom every evening he had followed at a distance, but to whom he had never dared to address a word.  Sandoz nursed dreams of ladies met while travelling, beautiful girls who would suddenly spring up in some unknown wood, charm him for a whole day, and melt into air at dusk.  The only love adventure which they had ever met with still evoked their laughter, so silly did it seem to them now.  It consisted of a series of serenades which they had given to two young ladies during the time when they, the serenaders, had formed part of the college band.  They passed their nights beneath a window playing the clarinet and the cornet-a-piston, and thus raising a discordant din which frightened all the folk of the neighbourhood, until one memorable evening the indignant parents had emptied all the water pitchers of the family over them.

Ah! those were happy days, and how loving was the laughter with which they recalled them.  On the walls of the studio hung a series of sketches, which Claude, it so happened, had made during a recent trip southward.  Thus it seemed as if they were surrounded by the familiar vistas of bright blue sky overhanging a tawny country-side.  Here stretched a plain dotted with little greyish olive trees as far as a rosy network of distant hills.  There, between sunburnt russet slopes, the exhausted Viorne was almost running dry beneath the span of an old dust-bepowdered bridge, without a bit of green, nothing save a few bushes, dying for want of moisture.  Farther on, the mountain gorge of the Infernets showed its yawning chasm amidst tumbled rocks, struck down by lightning, a huge chaos, a wild desert, rolling stony billows as far as the eye could reach.  Then came all sorts of well remembered nooks:  the valley of Repentance, narrow and shady, a refreshing oasis amid calcined fields; the wood of Les Trois Bons-Dieux, with hard, green, varnished pines shedding pitchy tears beneath the burning sun; the sheep walk of Bouffan, showing white, like a mosque, amidst a far-stretching blood-red plain.  And there were yet bits of blinding, sinuous roads; ravines, where the heat seemed even to wring bubbling perspiration from the pebbles; stretches of arid, thirsty sand, drinking up rivers drop by drop; mole hills, goat paths, and hill crests, half lost in the azure sky.