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Title: Child Life In Town And Country
1909

Author: Anatole France

Translator: Alfred Allinson

Release Date: May 9, 2008 [EBook #25408]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHILD LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY ***

Produced by David Widger

THE MERRIE TALES OF JACQUES TOURNEBROCHE

AND CHILD LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY

By Anatole France

John Lane Company, MCMXIX

Copyright 1909

John Lane Company

CHILD LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY

FANCHON

[Illustration: 164]

I

FANCHON went early one morning, like Little Red Riding-Hood, to see
her grandmother, who lives right at the other end of the village. But
Fanchon did not stop like little Red Riding-Hood, to gather nuts in the
wood. She went straight on her way and she did not meet the wolf. From
a long way off she saw her grandmother sitting on the stone step at her
cottage door, a smile on her toothless mouth and her arms, as dry and
knotty as an old vine-stock, open to welcome her little granddaughter.
It rejoices Fanchon's heart to spend a whole day with her grandmother;
and her grandmother, whose trials and troubles are all over and who
lives as happy as a cricket in the warm chimney-corner, is rejoiced too
to see her son's little girl, the picture of her own childhood.

They have many things to tell each other, for one of them is coming back
from the journey of life which the other is setting out on.

"You grow a bigger girl every day," says the old grandmother to Fanchon,
"and every day I get smaller; I scarcely need now to stoop at all to
touch your forehead. What matters my great age when I can see the roses
of my girlhood blooming again in your cheeks, my pretty Fanchon?"

But Fanchon asked to be told again--for the hundredth time--all about
the glittering paper flowers under the glass shade, the coloured
pictures where our Generals in brilliant uniforms are overthrowing their
enemies, the gilt cups, some of which have lost their handles, while
others have kept theirs, and grandfather's gun that hangs above the
chimney-piec