How well I understand the complaint of Mao, in the popular tales of the ‘Foyer Breton’ who, when dying of hunger and thirst, says, as he looks at the bullfinches rifling the fruit-trees: 

“Alas! those birds are happier than Christians; they have no need of inns, or butchers, or bakers, or gardeners.  God’s heaven belongs to them, and earth spreads a continual feast before them!  The tiny flies are their game, ripe grass their cornfields, and hips and haws their store of fruit.  They have the right of taking everywhere, without paying or asking leave:  thus comes it that the little birds are happy, and sing all the livelong day!”

But the life of man in a natural state is like that of the birds; he equally enjoys nature.  “The earth spreads a continual feast before him.”  What, then, has he gained by that selfish and imperfect association which forms a nation?  Would it not be better for every one to turn again to the fertile bosom of nature, and live there upon her bounty in peace and liberty?

August 20th, four o’clock A.M.—­The dawn casts a red glow on my bed-curtains; the breeze brings in the fragrance of the gardens below.  Here I am again leaning on my elbows by the windows, inhaling the freshness and gladness of this first wakening of the day.

My eye always passes over the roofs filled with flowers, warbling, and sunlight, with the same pleasure; but to-day it stops at the end of a buttress which separates our house from the next.

The storms have stripped the top of its plaster covering, and dust carried by the wind has collected in the crevices, and, being fixed there by the rain, has formed a sort of aerial terrace, where some green grass has sprung up.  Among it rises a stalk of wheat, which to-day is surmounted by a sickly ear that droops its yellow head.

This poor stray crop on the roofs, the harvest of which will fall to the neighboring sparrows, has carried my thoughts to the rich crops which are now falling beneath the sickle; it has recalled to me the beautiful walks I took as a child through my native province, when the threshing-floors at the farmhouses resounded from every part with the sound of a flail, and when the carts, loaded with golden sheaves, came in by all the roads.  I still remember the songs of the maidens, the cheerfulness of the old men, the open-hearted merriment of the laborers.  There was, at that time, something in their looks both of pride and feeling.  The latter came from thankfulness to God, the former from the sight of the harvest, the reward of their labor.  They felt indistinctly the grandeur and the holiness of their part in the general work of the world; they looked with pride upon their mountains of corn-sheaves, and they seemed to say, Next to God, it is we who feed the world!

What a wonderful order there is in all human labor!