et dim forests where the young
men and maidens went on every holy day and feast-day in the summer-time
to seek for wood-anemones, and lilies of the pools, and the wild
campanula, and the fresh dog-rose, and all the boughs and grasses
that made their house-doors like garden bowers, and seemed to take the
cushat's note and the linnet's song into their little temple of God.

The Berceau de Dieu was very old indeed. Men said that the hamlet had
been there in the day of the Virgin of Orleans; and a stone cross of the
twelfth century still stood by the great pond of water at the bottom
of the street under the chestnut-tree, where the villagers gathered to
gossip at sunset when their work was done. It had no city near it, and
no town nearer than four leagues. It was in the green care of a pastoral
district, thickly wooded and intersected with orchards. Its produce of
wheat and oats and cheese and fruit and eggs was more than sufficient
for its simple prosperity. Its people were hardy, kindly, laborious,
happy; living round the little gray chapel in amity and good-fellowship.
Nothing troubled it. War and rumours of war, revolutions and
counter-revolutions, empires and insurrections, military and political
questions--these all were for it things unknown and unheard of, mighty
winds that arose and blew and swept the lands around it, but never came
near enough to harm it, lying there, as it did in its loneliness like
any lark's nest. Even in the great days of the Revolution it had been
quiet. It had had a lord whom it loved in the old castle on the hill at
whose feet it nestled; it had never tried to harm him, and it had wept
bitterly when he had fallen at Jemmapes, and left no heir, and the
chateau had crumbled into ivy-hung ruins. The thunder-heats of that
dread time had scarcely scorched it. It had seen a few of its best youth
march away to the chant of the Marseillaise to fight on the plains of
Champagne; and it had been visited by some patriots in _bonnets rouges_
and soldiers in blue uniforms, who had given it tricoloured cockades and
bade it wear them in the holy name of the Republic one and indivisible.
But it had not known what these meant, and its harvests had been reaped
without the sound of a shot in its fields or any gleam of steel by its
innocent hearths; so that the terrors and the tidings of those noble and
ghastly years had left no impress on its generations.

Reine Allix, indeed, the oldest woman among them all,