the pretty little fair-haired girls with nice white stockings and
unmanageable crinolines. I like to watch the tiny damsels decked out
like reliquaries, and already affecting coquettish and lackadaisical
ways. It seems to me that in each of them I can see thousands of
charming faults already peeping forth. But all these miniature men and
women, exchanging postage stamps and chattering of dress, have something
of the effect of adorable monstrosities on me.

I like them as I like a bunch of grapes in February, or a dish of green
peas in December.

In the babies' kingdom, my friend, my favorite is the country baby,
running about in the dust on the highway barefoot and ragged, and
searching for black birds' and chaffinches' nests on the outskirts of the
woods. I love his great black wondering eye, which watches you fixedly
from between two locks of un combed hair, his firm flesh bronzed by the
sun, his swarthy forehead, hidden by his hair, his smudged face and his
picturesque breeches kept from falling off by the paternal braces
fastened to a metal button, the gift of a gendarme.

Ah! what fine breeches; not very long in the legs, but, then, what room
everywhere else! He could hide away entirely in this immense space which
allows a shirt-tail, escaping through a slit, to wave like a flag. These
breeches preserve a remembrance of all the garments of the family; here
is a piece of maternal petticoat, here a fragment of yellow waistcoat,
here a scrap of blue handkerchief; the whole sewn with a thread that
presents the twofold advantage of being seen from a distance, and of not
breaking.

But under these patched clothes you can make out a sturdy little figure;