that no stream returns to its source; that one must run with the years, and not be wasteful in regret for a past that no effort can regain.
Anxiety claimed me again as I caught sight of the station at the end of my sorrowful journey. With its openwork balcony running along its single story and its indented roof, it bears a specious resemblance to an Alpine chalet. A thick ivy grows luxuriantly along the walls. A very beautiful garden surrounds it: for the station-master is an ardent gardener, and with the modest plot of ground given over to him along the rails he has managed to make a charming flower-bed, whose old unfashionable flowers I used to love,—asters, dragon-flowers, balsams, china-asters, bleached dandelions; flowers that have almost disappeared, driven out by the complicated inventions of fashionable horticulturists, and that now linger only in some old gardens like this one, where they make one think of ancient ladies playing upon the harpsichord.
This station-master, formerly an officer in Africa, stranded in this lost corner of the world after an adventurous youth of which certain episodes, distorted by tradition, are current through the countryside, was an original character, a "type" as we should say. I caught sight of him, aged, whitened, and his figure broken, as he passed in his gold-laced cap before the cars as they were opened. Formerly he had held his bell in his
