ittle cafes
were thronged with pleasure seekers, and the crowds flocked hither and
thither to the woods, to the theatres, to the galleries, to the
guinguettes, Bebee, going gravely along with her emptied baskets
homeward, envied none of these.

When at Noel the little children hugged their loads of puppets and
sugar-plums; when at the Fete Dieu the whole people flocked out
be-ribboned and vari-colored like any bed of spring anemones; when in the
merry midsummer the chars-a-bancs trundled away into the forest with
laughing loads of students and maidens; when in the rough winters the
carriages left furred and jewelled women at the doors of the operas or
the palaces,--Bebee, going and coming through the city to her flower
stall or lace work, looked at them all, and never thought of envy or
desire.

She had her little hut: she could get her bread; she lived with the
flowers; the neighbors were good to her, and now and then, on a saint's
day, she too got her day in the woods; it never occurred to her that her
lot could be better.

But sometimes sitting, looking at the dark old beauty of the Broodhuis,
or at the wondrous carven fronts of other Spanish houses, or at the
painted stories of the cathedral windows, or at the quaint colors of the
shipping on the quay, or at the long dark aisles of trees that went away
through the forest, where her steps had never wandered,--sometimes Bebee
would get pondering on all this unknown world that lay before and behind
and around her, and a sense of her own utter ignorance would steal on
her; and she would say to herself, "If only I knew a little--just a very
little!"

But it is not easy to know even a very little when you have to work for
your bread from sunrise to nightfall, and when none of your friends know
how to read or write, and even your old priest is one of a family of
peasants, and can just teach you the alphabet, and that is all. For
Father Francis could do no more than this; and all his spare time was
taken up in digging his cabbage plot and seeing to his beehives; and the
only books that Bebee ever beheld were a few tattered lives of saints
that lay moth-eaten on a shelf of his cottage.

But Brussels has stones that are sermons, or rather that are quaint,
touching, illuminated legends of the Middle Ages, which those who run may
read.

Brussels is a gay little city that lies as bright within its girdle of
woodland as any butterfly that rests upon moss.

The city has