“Once upon a time a little girl when she opened a large fruit that had come from the colonies, a big creature came out of it, a green creature, and it bit her and that made her die.”  
It was my little friend Antoinette (she was six and I seven) who was telling me the story which had been suggested to her because we were about to break and divide an apricot between us. We were at the extreme end of her garden in the lovely month of June under a branching apricot tree. We sat very close together upon the same stool in a house about as big as a bee-hive, which we had built for our exclusive use out of old planks¹. Our dwelling² was covered with pieces of foreign matting that had come from the Antilles packed about some boxes of coffee. The sunbeams pierced the roof, which was of a coarse straw-colored material, and the warm breeze that stirred the leaves of the trees about us made the sunlight dance as it fell upon our faces and aprons³. (During at least two summers it had been our favorite amusement to build, in isolated⁴ nooks, houses like the one described in Robinson Crusoe, and thus hidden away we would sit together and chat.) In the story of the little girl who was bitten by the big creature this phrase, “a very large fruit from the colonies,” had suddenly plunged⁵ me into a reverie. And I had a vision of trees, of strange fruits, and of forests filled with marvelously colored birds. Ah! how much those magical but disturbing words, “the colonies” conveyed to me in my childhood. To me they meant at that time all tropical and distant countries, which I invariably thought of as filled with giant palms, exquisite⁶ flowers, strange black people and great animals. Although my ideas were so confused I had an almost true conception, amounting to an intuition, of their mournful splendor⁷ and their enervating⁸ melancholy⁹.
 
I think that I saw a palm for the first time in an illustrated¹⁰ book called the “Young Naturalists,” by Madame Ulliac-Tremadeure; the book was one of my New Year's gifts, and I read some parts of it upon New Year's evening. (Green-house palms had not at that time been brought to our little town.)
 
The illustrator had placed two of these unfamiliar¹¹ trees at the edge of a sea-shore along which negroes were passing. Recently I was curious enough to hunt in the little yellow, faded book for that picture, and truly I wonder how that illustration had the power to create the very least of my dreams unless it were that my immature¹² mind was already

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