44 A TOUB, BOUND MY GARDEN. 



to brave the teeth of man. This El Dorado, in which the 

 worm, sheltered from the inclemency of the seasons, had 

 enjoyed at discretion the food which best suited it, has 

 become a prison : it must get out, for it is in the earth that 

 its metamorphosis must take place; nature has given it, at 

 the age it has then attained, teeth which enable it to make a 

 perfectly round hole in the walls of its prison, by which it 

 effects its escape. When you see a nut with a hole thus 

 made, you may be sure that the worm which inhabited it has 

 either left it or is about to leave it ; the hole by which it 

 entered is long since cicatrised. 



When we examine thus the lives of these little creatures, 

 divided into two such distinct ages, we abandon ourselves to 

 singular reveries. At first, it is a worm of an ugly shape, 

 condemned to an humble, obscure, and laborious life, and sur- 

 rounded by enemies. It soon ceases to eat ; it spins itself a 

 winding-sheet of silk, and encloses itself in it. There it is, 

 as far as our eyes can convince us, as dead as it can be ; but 

 wait a few days, and it issues from the winding-sheet clothed 

 in the richest colours, with brilliant wings which enable it to 

 fly above that earth upon which it had seemed painfully to 

 crawl. It finds in the sweet air a female beautiful and happy 

 as'itself, and their loves terminate only with their existence. 



This life which we lead upon earth, is it really our perfect 

 state? Is that which we call death really the end of life? 

 Have we not also to hope for celestial wings, with which to 

 hover about the sun and beautiful stars — above the miseries, 

 passions, and wants, of a first existence? 



Bernardin de St. Pierre, who really loved flowers and 

 trees, and who often speaks of them very delightfully, adopted 

 a point of view which, necessarily, often led him to describe 

 things very difierently from what they really are : he thought 

 that man was the centre and the object of the entire creation; 

 that everything had been made for him. Sometimes, things 

 presented themselves which he found it very difficult to recon- 

 cile with this system so generally adopted — and I don't know 

 why. He somewhere says that nature has only placed odori- 

 ferous flowers in the grass upon low stems, or upon shrubs, but 

 that not one bloomed upon a lofty tree. Bernardin de St. 

 Pierre forgot the acacia, which often rises to a height of 



