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104 wander through space like lost birds; nothing guides them, nothing satisfies them, and such is our weakness, that to regulate their flight we must have this duty of gaining bit by bit our daily bread.

The train now stopped at petty stations, the names of which, called out by the employees, with a country accent, brought back another series of recollections. Between my twelfth and sixteenth years, my father was in the habit of taking me for a walk each Sunday, winter and summer, for health's sake he said. I was lazy about walking, and detested these excursions. But he would not give them up or let me escape them. Thus have I traversed the country with him, sometimes walking, sometimes driving, or else on this very railroad, the cars of which were never new, in order to reach a more distant station. In all these towns, scattered over the plain or perched on the lower buttresses of the Jura, my father had friends who welcomed us,—worthy people to whom I should have preferred comrades of my own age; or, perhaps we would stop at an inn to refresh ourselves with an omelette and a glass of white wine. I now recognized certain of those inns and hospitable homes, much the same as in old days, some of them a little more dilapidated, others renovated, and surrounded merely by thicker verdure; and I discovered also, in the depths of my memory, the