“It’s only the plovers flying about the moon,” said he.  “Five hundred lines!”

I did my five hundred lines.  They taught me that dreaming was illegal and dangerous, but they neither convinced nor cured me.

I still believe that there are scattered up and down in nature voices that speak, but which few hear; just as there are millions of flowers that bloom unseen by man.  It is sad for those who catch a hint of it.  Perforce they come back and seek the hidden springs.  They waste their youth and vigor upon empty dreams, and in return for the fleeting glimpses they have enjoyed, for the perfect phrase half caught and lost again, will have given up the intercourse of their kind, and even friendship itself.  Yes, it is sad for the schoolboys who open their windows to gaze at the moon, and never drop the habit!  They will find themselves, all too soon, solitaries in the midst of life, desolate as I am desolate tonight, beside my dead fire.

No friend will come to knock at my door; not one.  I have a few comrades to whom I give that name.  We do not loathe one another.  At need they would help me.  But we seldom meet.  What should they do here?  Dreamers make no confidences; they shrivel up into themselves and are caught away on the four winds of heaven.  Politics drive them mad; gossip fails to interest them; the sorrows they create have no remedy save the joys that they invent; they are natural only when alone, and talk well only to themselves.

The only man who can put up with this moody contrariety of mine is Sylvestre Lampron.  He is nearly twenty years older than I. That explains his forbearance.  Besides, between an artist like him and a dreamer like myself there is only the difference of handiwork.  He translates his dreams.  I waste mine; but both dream.  Dear old Lampron!  Kindly, stalwart heart!  He has withstood that hardening of the moral and physical fibre which comes over so many men as they near their fortieth year.  He shows a brave front to work and to life.  He is cheerful, with the manly cheerfulness of a noble heart resigned to life’s disillusions.

When I enter his home, I nearly always find him sitting before a small ground-glass window in the corner of his studio, bent over some engraving.  I have leave to enter at all hours.  He is free not to stir from his work.  “Good-day,” he calls out, without raising his head, without knowing for certain who has come in, and goes on with the engraving he has in hand.  I settle down at the end of the room, on the sofa with the faded cover, and, until Lampron deigns to grant me audience, I am free to sleep, or smoke, or turn over the wonderful drawings that lean against the walls.  Among them are treasures beyond price; for Lampron is a genius whose only mistake is to live and act with modesty, so that as yet people only say that he has “immense talent.”  No painter or engraver of repute—­and he is both—­has served a more conscientious