nd him, she found force to
brave and cross it.

The miners and glass-blowers and nail-makers, rough and fierce and hard,
frightened her. The women did not look like women, and the children ran
and yelled at her, and set their dogs upon her. The soil was thick with
dust like soot, and the trees were seared and brown. There was no peace
in the place, and no loveliness. Eighty thousand folks toiled together in
the hopeless Tophet, and swarmed, and struggled, and labored, and
multiplied, in joyless and endless wrestling against hunger and death.

She got through it somehow, hiding often from the ferocious youngsters,
and going sleepless rather than lie in those dens of filth; but she
seemed so many, many years older when Charleroi lay at last behind
her,--so many, many years older than when she had sat and spun in the
garden at home.

When she was once in the valley of the Sambre she was more herself again,
only she felt weaker than she had ever done, because she only dared to
spend one of her sous each day, and one sou got so little food.

In the woods and fields about Alne she began to breathe again, like a
bird loosed to the air after being shut in a wooden trap. Green corn,
green boughs, green turf, mellow chimes of church bells, humming of
golden bees, cradle songs of women spinning, homely odors of little herb
gardens and of orchard trees under cottage walls,--these had been around
her all her life; she only breathed freely among them.

She often felt tired, and her wooden shoes were wearing so thin that the
hot dust of the road at noonday burnt her feet through them. Sometimes,
too, she felt a curious brief faintness, such as she had never known, for
the lack of food and the long fatigue began to tell even on her hardy
little body.

But she went on bravely, rarely doing less than her twenty miles a day,
and sometimes more, walking often in the night to save time, and lying
down in cow-sheds or under haystacks in the noontide.

For the most part people were kind to her; they saw she was so very young
and so poor.

Women would give her leave to bathe herself in their bedchambers,
and children would ask her to wait on the village bench under the
chestnut-tree, while they brought her their pet lamb or their tumbler
pigeons to look at, but, for the most part--unless she was very, very
tired--she would not wait. It took her so long, and who could tell how it
fared with him in Paris?

Into the little churches, sc