yes from the sun,
"very old--ninety-two last summer. But when one has a roof over one's
head, and a pot of soup always, and a grandson like mine, and when one
has lived all one's life in the Berceau de Dieu, then it is well to be
so old. Ah, yes, my little ones--yes, though you doubt it, you little
birds that have just tried your wings--it is well to be so old. One has
time to think, and thank the good God, which one never seemed to have a
minute to do in that work, work, work, when one was young."

* * *

The end soon came.

From hill to hill the Berceau de Dieu broke into flames. The village was
a lake of fire, into which the statue of the Christ, burning and
reeling, fell. Some few peasants, with their wives and children, fled to
the woods, and there escaped one torture to perish more slowly of cold
and famine. All other things perished. The rapid stream of the flame
licked up all there was in its path. The bare trees raised their
leafless branches on fire at a thousand points. The stores of corn and
fruit were lapped by millions of crimson tongues. The pigeons flew
screaming from their roosts and sank into the smoke. The dogs were
suffocated on the thresholds they had guarded all their lives. The calf
was stifled in the byre. The sheep ran bleating with the wool burning on
their living bodies. The little caged birds fluttered helpless, and then
dropped, scorched to cinders. The aged and the sick were stifled in
their beds. All things perished.

The Berceau de Dieu was as one vast furnace, in which every living
creature was caught and consumed and changed to ashes.

The tide of war has rolled on and left it a blackened waste, a smoking
ruin, wherein not so much as a mouse may creep or a bird may nestle. It
is gone, and its place can know it never more.

Never more.

But who is there to care?

It was but as a leaf which the great storm withered as it passed.

* * *

"Look you," she had said to him oftentimes, "in my babyhood there was
the old white flag upon the chateau. Well, they pulled that down and put
up a red one. That toppled and fell, and there was one of three
colours. Then somebody with a knot of white lilies in his hand came one
day and set up the old white one afresh; and before the day was done
that was down again, and the tricolour again up where it is still. Now
some I know fretted themselves greatly because of all these changes of
the flags, but as for