ge, and there began meadows which sloped down to the river and were
filled in summer with the perfume of flowers and all the music of the
earth. Behind the great house a kitchen-garden encroached on the meadow.
The first ray of the sun was for it, and so was the last. Here the
cherries ripened in May, and the currants often earlier, and a week before
Assumption, usually, you could not pass within a hundred feet without
breathing among the hedges the heavy odor of the melons.

But you must not think that the abbe of St. Philemon was a gourmand. He
had reached the age when appetite is only a memory. His shoulders were
bent, his face was wrinkled, he had two little gray eyes, one of which
could not see any longer, and he was so deaf in one ear that if you
happened to be on that side you just had to get round on the other.

Mercy, no! he did not eat all the fruits in his orchard. The boys got
their share--and a big share--but the biggest share, by all odds, was
eaten by the birds--the blackbirds, who lived there very comfortably all
the year, and sang in return the best they could; the orioles, pretty
birds of passage, who helped them in summer, and the sparrows, and the
warblers of every variety; and the tomtits, swarms of them, with feathers
as thick as your fingers, and they hung on the branches and pecked at a
grape or scratched a pear--veritable little beasts of prey, whose only
"thank you" was a shrill cry like a saw.

Even to them, old age had made the abbe of St. Philemon indulgent. "The
beasts cannot correct their faults," he used to say; "if I got angry at
them for not changing I'd have to get angry with a good many of my
parishioners!"

And he contented himself with clapping his hands together loud when he
went into his orchard, so he should not see too much stealing.

Then there was a spreading of wings, as if all the silly flowers cut off
by a great wind were flying away; gray, and white, and yellow, and
mottled, a short flight, a rustling of leaves, and then quiet for five
minutes. But what minutes! Fancy, if you can, that there was not one
factory in the village, not a weaver or a blacksmith, and that the noise
of men with their horses and cattle, spreading over the wide, distant
plains, melted into the whispering of the breeze and was lost. Mills were
unknown, the roads were little frequented, the railroads were very far
away. Indeed, if the ravagers of his garden had repented for long the abbe
would hav