.

As the day grew on there came an old, hard-featured man, who wept as
women weep.

"I was cruel to the lad," he muttered, "and now I would have made
amends--yea, to the half of my substance--and he should have been to me
as a son."

There came also, as the day grew apace, a painter who had fame in the
world, and who was liberal of hand and of spirit.

"I seek one who should have had the prize yesterday had worth won," he
said to the people,--"a boy of rare promise and genius. An old
woodcutter on a fallen tree at eventide--that was all his theme. But
there was greatness for the future in it. I would fain find him, and
take him with me and teach him art."

* * *

Death had been more pitiful to them than longer life would have been. It
had taken the one in the loyalty of love, and the other in the innocence
of faith, from a world which for love has no recompense, and for faith
no fulfilment.

All their lives they had been together, and in their deaths they were
not divided; for when they were found the arms of the boy were folded
too closely around the dog to be severed without violence, and the
people of their little village, contrite and ashamed, implored a special
grace for them, and, making them one grave, laid them to rest there side
by side--for ever.

_A BRANCH OF LILAC._

And indeed I loved France: still, in the misery of my life, I loved her
for all that I had had from her.

I loved her for her sunny roads, for her cheery laughter, for her
vine-hung hamlets, for her contented poverty, for her gay, sweet mirth,
for her pleasant days, for her starry nights, for her little bright
groups at the village fountain, for her old, brown, humble peasants at
her wayside crosses, for her wide, wind-swept plains all red with her
radiant sunsets. She had given me beautiful hours; she is the mother of
the poor, who sings to them so that they forget their hunger and their
nakedness; she had made me happy in my youth. I was not ungrateful.

It was in the heats of September that I reached my country. It was just
after the day of Sedan. I heard all along the roads, as I went, sad,
sullen murmurs of our bitter disasters. It was not the truth exactly
that was ever told at the poor wine-shops and about the harvest-fields,
but it was near enough to the truth to be horrible.

The blood-thirst which had been upon me ever since that night when I
found her chair empty seemed to burn and seethe, t