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utmost profundity, evanescence, and mystery—with a quiet
suggestion of infinity; afternoon or evening, it seemed to
have set them flowering in the heart of the sky.
After leaving this park the Vivonne began to flow again
more swiftly. How often have I watched, and longed to imi-
tate, when I should be free to live as I chose, a rower who
had shipped his oars and lay stretched out on his back, his
head down, in the bottom of his boat, letting it drift with the
current, seeing nothing but the sky which slipped quietly
above him, shewing upon his features a foretaste of happi-
ness and peace.
We would sit down among the irises at the water’s edge.
In the holiday sky a lazy cloud streamed out to its full
length. Now and then, crushed by the burden of idleness, a
carp would heave up out of the water, with an anxious gasp.
It was time for us to feed. Before starting homewards we
would sit for a long time there, eating fruit and bread and
chocolate, on the grass, over which came to our ears, hori-
zontal, faint, but solid still and metallic, the sound of the
bells of Saint-Hilaire, which had melted not at all in the at-
mosphere it was so well accustomed to traverse, but, broken
piecemeal by the successive palpitation of all their sonorous
strokes, throbbed as it brushed the flowers at our feet.
Sometimes, at the water’s edge and embedded in trees,
we would come upon a house of the kind called ‘pleasure
houses,’ isolated and lost, seeing nothing of the world, save
the river which bathed its feet. A young woman, whose pen-
sive face and fashionable veils did not suggest a local origin,
and who had doubtless come there, in the popular phrase,

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