Delightful as was the winter climate of Nyons, that sun-scorched little cup amongst the hills became a place of positive torment as the summer advanced.  The heat was absolutely unendurable.  Day and night, thousands of cicades (the cigales of the French) kept up their incessant “dzig, dzig, dzig,” a sound very familiar to those who have sojourned in the tropics.  Has Nature given this singular insect the power of dispensing with sleep?  What possible object can it hope to attain by keeping up this incessant din?  If a love-song, surely the most optimistic cicada must realise that his amorous strains can never reach the ears of his lady-love, since hundreds of his brethren are all keeping up the same perpetual purposeless chirping, which must obviously drown any individual effort.  Have the cicadas a double dose of gaiete francaise in their composition, and is this their manner of expressing it?  Are they, like some young men we know, always yearning to turn night into day?  All these are, and will remain, unsolved problems?

As I found the summer heat of Nyons unbearable, I went back to England for a holiday, and, on the morning of my departure, climbed some olive trees and captured fourteen live cicadas, whom I imprisoned in a perforated cardboard box, and took back to London with me.  Twelve of them survived the journey, and as soon as I had arrived, I carefully placed the cicadas on the boughs of the trees in our garden in Green Street, Grosvenor Square.  Conceive the surprise of these travelled insects at finding themselves on the soot-laden branches of a grimy London tree!  The dauntless little creatures at once recommenced their “dzig, dzig, dzig,” in their novel environment, and kept it up uninterruptedly for twenty-four hours, in spite of the lack of appreciation of my family, who complained that their night’s rest had been seriously interfered with by the unaccustomed noise.  Next evening the cicadas were silent.  Possibly they had been choked with soot, or had fallen a prey to London cats; but my own theory is that they succumbed to the after-effects of a rough Channel passage, to which, of course, they would not have been accustomed.  Anyhow, for the first time in the history of the world, the purlieus of Grosvenor Square rang with the shrill chirping of cicadas for twenty-four hours on end.

Six months later I regretfully bid farewell to Nyons, and went direct from there to Germany.  After studying the Teutonic tongue for two and a half years at Harrow I was master of just two words in it, ja and nein, so unquestionably there were gaps to fill up.

I was excedingly sorry to leave the delightful Ducros family who had treated me so kindly, and I owe a deep debt of gratitude to comely Mme. Ducros for the careful way in which she taught me history.  In teaching history she used what I may call the synoptic method, taking periods of fifty years, and explaining contemporaneous events in France, Italy, Germany, and England during that period.