NEWS OF SPRING 

 I 



1HAVE seen how Spring stores up sunshine, leaves and 

 flowers and makes ready, long beforehand, to invade the 

 North. Here, on the ever-balmy shores of the Mediter- 

 ranean — that motionless sea which looks as though it were 

 under glass — where, while the months are dark in the rest of 

 Europe, Spring has taken shelter from the wind and the snows 

 in a palace of peace and light and love, it is interesting, in the 

 fields of undying green, to detect its preparations for travel- 

 ling. I can see clearly that it is afraid, that it hesitates to face 

 once more the mighty frost-traps which February and March 

 annually lay for it beyond the mountains. It waits, it dallies, 

 it tries its strength before resuming the harsh and cruel road 

 which the hypocrite Winter seems to yield to it. It stops, sets 

 out again, revisits a thousand times, like a child running 

 round the garden of its holidays, the fragrant valleys, the ten- 

 der hills which the frost has never brushed with its wings. 

 It has nothing to do here, nothing to revive, since nothing has 

 perished and nothing suffered, since all the flowers of every 



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