off across the meadows for her home, the chimneys
of which she could see smoking a long way off against the red sky of
sunset.

On the road she met Antoine, the gardener's little boy. He asked her:

"Will you come and play with me, Fanchon?"

But she answered:

"I won't stop to play with you, because my grandmother told me not to.
But I will give you an apple, because I love you very much."

Antoine took the apple and kissed the little girl.

They loved each other fondly.

He called her his little wife, and she called him her little husband.

As she went on her way, stepping soberly along like a staid, grown-up
person, she heard behind her a merry twittering of birds, and turning
round to look, she saw they were the same little pensioners she had fed
when they were hungry. They came flying after her.

"Good night, little friends," she called to them, "good night! It's
bedtime now, so good night!"

And the winged songsters answered her with little cries that mean "God
keep you!" in bird language.

So Fanchon came back to her mother's to the sound of sweet music in the
air.

IV

[Illustration: 174]

FANCHON lay down in the dark in her little bed, which a carpenter in
the village had made long ago of walnut-wood and carved a light railing
alongside. The good old man had been resting years and years now under
the shadow of the church, in a grass-grown bed; for Fanchon's cot had
been her grandfather's when he was a little lad, and he had slept where
she sleeps now. A curtain of pink-sprigged cotton protects her slumbers;
she sleeps, and in her dreams she sees the Blue Bird flying to his
sweetheart's Castle. She thinks he is as beautiful as a star, but she
never expects him to come and light on her shoulder. She knows _she_
is not a Princess, and no Prince changed into a blue bird will come to
visit her. She tells herself that all birds are not Princes; that the
birds of her village are villagers, and that there might be one perhaps
found amongst them, a little country lad changed into a sparrow by a
bad fairy and wearing in his heart under his brown feathers the love of
little Fanchon. Yes, if _he_ came and she knew him, she would give him
not bread crumbs only, but cake and kisses. She would so like to see
him, and lo! she sees him; he comes and perches on her shoulder. He is
a jack-sparrow, only a common sparrow. He has nothing rich or rare about
him, but he looks alert and lively. To tell the trut