agan he was at heart! He admired
masculine beauty like a Greek; he must have been a singularly happy
man--few more happy----"

_A LEAF IN THE STORM._

The Berceau de Dieu was a little village in the valley of the Seine.

As a lark drops its nest amongst the grasses, so a few peasant people
had dropped their little farms and cottages amidst the great green woods
on the winding river. It was a pretty place, with one steep, stony
street, shady with poplars and with elms; quaint houses, about whose
thatch a cloud of white and grey pigeons fluttered all day long; a
little aged chapel with a conical red roof; and great barns covered with
ivy and thick creepers, red and purple, and lichens that were yellow in
the sun.

All around it there were the broad, flowering meadows, with the sleek
cattle of Normandy fattening in them, and the sweet dim forests where
the young men and maidens went on every holy-day and feast-day in the
summer-time to seek for wood-anemones, and lilies of the pools, and the
wild campanula, and the fresh dogrose, and all the boughs and grasses
that made their house-doors like garden-bowers, and seemed to take the
cushat's note and the linnet's song into their little temple of God.

The Berceau de Dieu was very old indeed.

Men said that the hamlet had been there in the day of the Virgin of
Orleans; and a stone cross of the twelfth century still stood by the
great pond of water at the bottom of the street, under the
chestnut-tree, where the villagers gathered to gossip at sunset when
their work was done.

It had no city near it, and no town nearer than four leagues. It was in
the green core of a pastoral district, thickly wooded and intersected
with orchards. Its produce of wheat, and oats, and cheese, and fruit,
and eggs, was more than sufficient for its simple prosperity. Its people
were hardy, kindly, laborious, happy; living round the little grey
chapel in amity and good-fellowship.

Nothing troubled it. War and rumours of war, revolutions and
counter-revolutions, empires and insurrections, military and political
questions--these all were for it things unknown and unheard of--mighty
winds that arose and blew and swept the lands around it, but never came
near enough to harm it, lying there, as it did, in its loneliness like
any lark's nest.

* * *

"I am old: yes, I am very old," she would say, looking up from her
spinning-wheel in her house-door, and shading her e