other."

"Where is the mischief, good Reine?" said Bebee, who was always prettily
behaved with her elders, though, when pushed to it, she could hold her
own.

"The mischief will be in discontent," said the sabot-maker's wife.
"People live on their own little patch, and think it is the world; that
is as it should be--everybody within his own, like a nut in its shell.
But when you get reading, you hear of a swarm of things you never saw,
and you fret because you cannot see them, and you dream, and dream, and a
hole is burnt in your soup-pot, and your dough is as heavy as lead. You
are like bees that leave their own clover fields to buzz themselves dead
against the glass of a hothouse."

Bebee smiled, reaching to spread out her linen. But she said nothing.

"What good is it talking to them?" she thought; "they do not know."

Already the neighbors and friends of her infancy seemed so far, far away;
creatures of a distant world, that she had long left; it was no use
talking, they never would understand.

"Antoine should never have taught you your letters," said Reine, groaning
under the great blue shirts she was hanging on high among the leaves. "I
told him so at the time. I said, 'The child is a good child, and spins,
and sews, and sweeps, rare and fine for her age; why go and spoil her?'
But he was always headstrong. Not a child of mine knows a letter, the
saints be praised! nor a word of any tongue but our own good Flemish. You
should have been brought up the same. You would have come to no trouble
then."

"I am in no trouble, dear Reine," said Bebee, scattering the potato-peels
to the clacking poultry, and she smiled into the faces of the golden
oxlips that nodded to her back again in sunshiny sympathy.

"Not yet," said Reine, hanging her last shirt.

But Bebee was not hearing; she was calling the chickens, and telling the
oxlips how pretty they looked in the borders; and in her heart she was
counting the minutes till the old Dutch cuckoo-clock at Mere Krebs's--the
only clock in the lane--should crow out the hour at which she went down
to the city.

She loved the hut, the birds, the flowers; but they were little to her
now compared with the dark golden picturesque square, the changing
crowds, the frowning roofs, the gray stones, and colors and shadows of
the throngs for one face and for one smile.

"He is sure to be there," she thought, and started half an hour earlier
than was her wont. She wanted to tell h