a very
ecstasy, as the clear morning broadened into gold and the west wind rose
and blew from the sands by the sea.

"Yes--it is good--if one did not tire so soon," said he, watching her
with a listless pleasure.

But she did not hear; she was beyond the reach of any power to sadden
her; she was watching the white oxen that stood on the purple brow of
the just reapen lands, and the rosy clouds that blew like a shower of
apple-blossoms across the sky to the south.

There was a sad darkling Calvary on the edge of the harvest-field that
looked black against the blue sky; its shadow fell across the road, but
she did not see it: she was looking at the sun.

There is not much change in the great Soignies woods. They are aisles on
aisles of beautiful green trees, crossing and recrossing; tunnels of dark
foliage that look endless; long avenues of beech, of oak, of elm, or of
fir, with the bracken and the brushwood growing dense between; a
delicious forest growth everywhere, shady even at noon, and by a little
past midday dusky as evening; with the forest fragrance, sweet and dewy,
all about, and under the fern the stirring of wild game, and the white
gleam of little rabbits, and the sound of the wings of birds.

Soignies is not legend-haunted like the Black Forest, nor king-haunted
like Fontainebleau, nor sovereign of two historic streams like the brave
woods of Heidelberg; nor wild and romantic, arid broken with black rocks,
and poetized by the shade of Jaques, and swept through by a perfect
river, like its neighbors of Ardennes; nor throned aloft on mighty
mountains like the majestic oak glades of the Swabian hills of the ivory
carvers.

Soignies is only a Flemish forest in a plain, throwing its shadows over
corn-fields and cattle pastures, with no panorama beyond it and no
wonders in its depth. But it is a fresh, bold, beautiful forest for all
that.

It has only green leaves to give,--green leaves always, league after
league; but there is about it that vague mystery which all forests have,
and this universe of leaves seems boundless, and Pan might dwell in it,
and St. Hubert, and John Keats.

Bebee, in her rare holidays with the Bac children or with Jeannot's
sisters, had never penetrated farther than the glades of the Cambre,
and had never entered the heart of the true forest, which is much still
what it must have been in the old days when the burghers of Brabant cut
their yew bows and their pike staves from it to