ground, in every tint of green and yellow. From the
high bridge that crosses the canal the picture is--well, is
French-canally, and you know what that means--green-banked,
tree-shaded, with a towpath bordering the straight line of water, and
here and there a row of broad long canal-boats moving slowly through the
shadows.

By the time I get back I am ready for breakfast. You know I never could
eat or drink early in the morning. I have my coffee in the orchard
under a big pear tree, and I have the inevitable book propped against
the urn. Needless to say I never read a word. I simply look at the
panorama. All the same I have to have the book there or I could not
eat, just as I can't go to sleep without books on the bed.

After breakfast I write letters. Before I know it Amelie appears at the
library door to announce that "Madame est servie"--and the morning is
gone. As I am alone, as a rule I take my lunch in the breakfast-room.
It is on the north side of the house, and is the coolest room in the
house at noon. Besides, it has a window overlooking the plain. In the
afternoon I read and write and mend, and then I take a light supper in
the arbor on the east side of the house under a crimson rambler, one of
the first ever planted here over thirty years ago.

I must tell you about that crimson rambler. You know when I hired this
house it was only a peasant's hut. In front of what is now the
kitchen--it was then a dark hole for fuel--stood four dilapidated posts,
moss-covered and decrepit, over which hung a tangle of something. It
was what I called a "mess." I was not as educated as I am now. I
saw--it was winter--what looked to me an unsightly tangle of disorder.
I ordered those posts down. My workmen, who stood in some awe of me,--I
was the first American they had ever seen,--were slow in obeying. They
did not dispute the order, only they did not execute it.

One day I was very stern. I said to my head mason, "I have ordered that
thing removed half a dozen times. Be so good as to have those posts
taken down before I come out again."

He touched his cap, and said, "Very well, madame."

It happened that the next time I came out the weather had become
spring-like.

The posts were down. The tangle that had grown over them was trailing
on the ground--but it had begun to put out leaves. I looked at it--and
for the first time it occurred to me to say, "What is that?"

The mason looked at me a moment, a