ey are dead, but they smell good. They will make a fine
litter for Riquette, the goat, and Roussette, the cow. Pierre has taken
his big basket; he is quite a little man. Babet has her sack; she is
quite a little woman. Jeannot comes last trundling the wheelbarrow.

Down the hill they go at a run. At the edge of the wood they find the
other village children, who are come too to lay in a store of dead
leaves for the winter. It is not play, this; it is work.

But never think the children are sad, because they are at work. Work is
serious, yes; it is not sad. Very often the little ones mimic it in fun,
and children's games, most times, are copies of their elders' workaday
doings.

Now they are hard at it. The boys do their part in silence. They are
peasant lads, and will soon be men, and peasants do not talk much. But
it is different with the little peasant girls; _their_ tongues go at a
fine pace, as they fill the baskets and bags.

But now the sun is climbing higher and warming the country pleasantly.
From the cottage roofs rise light puffs of smoke. The children know what
that means. The smoke tells them the pease-soup is cooking in the pot.
One more armful of dead leaves, and the little workers will take the
road home. It is a stiff climb. Bending under sacks or toiling behind
barrows, they soon get hot, and the sweat comes out in beads. Pierre,
Babet and Jeannot stop to take breath.

But the thought of the pease-soup keeps up their courage. Puffing and
blowing, they reach home at last. Their mother is waiting for them on
the door-step and calls out: "Come along, children, the soup is ready."

Our little friends find this capital. There's no soup so good as what
you have worked for.

SUZANNE

[Illustration: 219]

THE Louvre, as you know, is a museum where beautiful things and ancient
things are kept safe--and this is wisely done, for old age and beauty
are both alike venerable. Among the most touching of the antiquities
treasured in the Louvre Museum is a fragment of marble, worn and cracked
in many places, but on which can still be clearly made out two maidens
holding each a flower in her hand. Both are beautiful figures; they were
young when Greece was young. They say it was the age of perfect beauty.
The sculptor who has left us their image represents them in profile,
offering each other one of those lotus flowers that were deemed sacred.
In the blue cups of their blossoms the world quaffed oblivion o