The Life of Jean Henri Fabre 



ordered state of society, we shall end, perhaps, 

 in the workhouse. Let us go ahead for all that: 

 our consolation shall be that we have increased 

 by one atom the general mass of knowledge, the 

 incomparable treasure of mankind. 



As this modest lot has fallen to me, I will re- 

 turn to the pond, notwithstanding the wise admoni- 

 tions and the bitter tears which I once owed to 

 it. I will return to the pond, but not to that of 

 the small ducks, the pond aflower with illusions: 

 those ponds do not occur twice in a lifetime. For 

 luck like that, you must be in all the new glory 

 of your first breeches and your first ideas. 



Many another have I come upon since that dis- 

 tant time, ponds very much richer and, moreover, 

 explored with the ripened eye of experience. En- 

 thusiastically I searched them with the net, stirred 

 up their mud, ransacked their trailing weeds. None 

 in my memories comes up to the first, magnified in 

 its delights and mortifications by the marvellous 

 perspective of the years. 1 



His excursions to the pond and the garden 

 were little more to our little Jean-Henri than 

 the preface to rather more distant excursions 

 in the neighbourhood of Saint-Leons. The 

 edge of the brook, the crest of the hill and 

 the skirts of the beechwood which limit his 

 horizon are the chosen spots to which his 



1 Souvenirs, pp. 260-270. The Life of the Fly, chap. 

 vii., "The Pond." 



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