_Ecoute un peu, man
vieux_!'
'I should love to hear it,' he said, louder, sitting up so abruptly in
his chair that Jimbo tilted at a dangerous angle, though still without
waking. 'Please, please go on.'
And he listened then to the quiet, silvery language in which the
little visitor described the scenery of her childhood, when, without
brothers or sisters, she was forced to play alone, and had amused
herself by imagining a Net of Constellations which she nailed by
shooting stars to four enormous pine trees that grew across the
torrent. She described the great mountains that enclosed her father's
estate, her loneliness in this giant garden, due to his morose
severity of character, her yearnings to escape and see the big world
beyond the ridges. All her thought and longing went to the fashioning
of this Net, and every night she flung it far across the peaks and
valleys to catch companions with whom she might play. The characters
in her fairy books came out of the pages to help her, and sometimes
when they drew it in, it was so heavy with the people entangled in its
meshes that they could scarcely move it. But the moment all were out,
the giant Net, relieved of their weight, flew back into the sky. The
Pleiades were its centre, because she loved the Pleiades best of all,
and Orion pursued its bright shape with passion, yet could never quite
come up with it.
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