Here, indeed, if anywhere, must be the much-sought tree, beneath whose shade perfect happiness had made its home.  They felt that it was nigh, such was the delight which stole through them amidst the dimness of those mighty arches.  The trees seemed to be creatures of kindliness, full of strength and silence and happy restfulness.  They looked at them one by one, and they loved them all; and they awaited from their majestic tranquillity some revelation whereby they themselves might grow, expand into the bliss of strong and perfect life.  The maples, the ashes, the hornbeams, the cornels, formed a nation of giants, a multitude full of proud gentleness, who lived in peace, knowing that the fall of any one of them would have sufficed to wreck a whole corner of the forest.  The elms displayed colossal bodies and limbs full of sap, scarce veiled by light clusters of little leaves.  The birches and the alders, delicate as sylphs, swayed their slim figures in the breeze to which they surrendered the foliage that streamed around them like the locks of goddesses already half metamorphosed into trees.  The planes shot up regularly with glossy tattooed bark, whence scaly fragments fell.  Down a gentle slope descended the larches, resembling a band of barbarians, draped in sayons of woven greenery.  But the oaks were the monarchs of all—­the mighty oaks, whose sturdy trunks thrust out conquering arms that barred the sun’s approach from all around them; Titan-like trees, oft lightning-struck, thrown back in postures like those of unconquered wrestlers, with scattered limbs that alone gave birth to a whole forest.

Could the tree which Serge and Albine sought be one of those colossal oaks? or was it one of those lovely planes, or one of those pale, maidenly birches, or one of those creaking elms?  Albine and Serge still plodded on, unable to tell, completely lost amongst the crowding trees.  For a moment they thought they had found the object of their quest in the midst of a group of walnut trees from whose thick foliage fell so cold a shadow that they shivered beneath it.  Further on they felt another thrill of emotion as they came upon a little wood of chestnut trees, green with moss and thrusting out big strange-shaped branches, on which one might have built an aerial village.  But further still Albine caught sight of a clearing, whither they both ran hastily.  Here, in the midst of a carpet of fine turf, a locust tree had set a very toppling of greenery, a foliaged Babel, whose ruins were covered with the strangest vegetation.  Stones, sucked up from the ground by the mounting sap, still remained adhering to the trunk.  High branches bent down to earth again, and, taking root, surrounded the parent tree with lofty arches, a nation of new trunks which ever increased and multiplied.  Upon the bark, seared with bleeding wounds, were ripening fruit-pods; the mere effort of bearing fruit strained the old monster’s skin until it split.  The young folks walked slowly round it, passing under the arched branches which formed as it were the streets of a city, and stared at the gaping cracks of the naked roots.  Then they went off, for they had not felt there the supernatural happiness they sought.