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them in flames. The trees before the houses were consumed with them. Yes, Roland, the district, the dear villages, the hospitable houses, which so often and so amicably received you and yours, these are in a brief space reduced to a desert, and in future I shall not be able perhaps to find a trace of where I lived with my parents, where I sat with them before the door, and played in the spring, where I became acquainted with my wife, where she bore me her first son. The stork will never again familiarly and confidingly take up his lodging on the roof of my barn, no swallow will again announce to me there the warmth of spring, and twitter with her young before my window. Oh! and my own children. Man indeed has no childhood, when he is deprived of his country. The poor women! how well known to us, how dear was each bush and running brook. Now we know, for the first time, how we loved our old cottages and the seats inherited from our great grandfathers. All that