[Illustration: "I AM THERE EVERY NIGHT."]
And the thicket beside and behind it is dark and dense for miles, with
many tall trees and a rich, tangled undergrowth.
There is a giant oak which it is difficult to find in that labyrinth (it
now stands, for the world, alone in the open; an ornament to the Auteuil
race-course) I have often climbed it as a boy, with Mimsey and the
rest; I cannot climb it now, but I love to lie on the grass in its
shade, and dream in my dream there, shut in on all sides by fragrant,
impenetrable verdure; with birds and bees and butterflies and
dragon-flies and strange beetles and little field-mice with bright eyes,
and lithe spotted snakes and lively brown squirrels and beautiful green
lizards for my company. Now and then a gentle roebuck comes and feeds
close by me without fear, and the mole throws up his little mound of
earth and takes an airing.
It is a very charming solitude.
It amuses me to think by day, when broad awake in my sad English prison,
and among my crazy peers, how this nightly umbrageous French solitude of
mine, so many miles and years away, is now but a common, bare, wide
grassy plain, overlooked by a gaudy, beflagged grand-stand.
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