numbering more
than ninety years, remembered when she was a child hearing her father
and his neighbours talk in low, awe-stricken tones one bitter wintry
night of how a king had been slain to save the people; and she
remembered likewise--remembered it well, because it had been her
betrothal night and the sixteenth birthday of her life--how a horseman
had flashed through the startled street like a comet, and had called
aloud, in a voice of fire, "_Gloire! gloire! gloire!_--Marengo! Marengo!
Marengo!" and how the village had dimly understood that something
marvellous for France had happened afar off, and how her brothers and
her cousins and her betrothed, and she with them, had all gone up to the
high slope over the river, and had piled up a great pyramid of pine wood
and straw and dried mosses, and had set flame to it, till it had glowed
in its scarlet triumph all through that wondrous night of the sultry
summer of victory.

These and the like memories she would sometimes relate to the children
at evening when they gathered round her begging for a story. Otherwise,
no memories of the Revolution or the Empire disturbed the tranquility of
the Berceau; and even she, after she had told them, would add, "I am not
sure now what Marengo was. A battle, no doubt, but I am not sure
where nor why. But we heard later that little Claudis, my aunt's
youngest-born, a volunteer not nineteen, died at it. If we had known, we
should not have gone up and lit the bonfire."

This woman, who had been born in that time of famine and flame, was the
happiest creature in the whole hamlet of the Berceau. "I am old; yes, I
am very old," she would say, looking up from her spinning-wheel in her
house-door, and shading her eyes from the sun, "very old--ninety-two
last summer. But when one has a roof over one's head, and a pot of soup
always, and a grandson like mine, and when one has lived all one's life
in the Berceau de Dieu, then it is well to be so old. Ah, yes, my little
ones,--yes, though you doubt it, you little birds that have just tried
your wings,--it is well to be so old. One has time to think, and thank
the good God, which one never seemed to have a minute to do in that
work, work, work when one was young."

Reine Allix was a tall and strong woman, very withered and very bent and
very brown, yet with sweet, dark, flashing eyes that had still light
in them, and a face that was still noble, though nearly a century had
bronzed it with its h