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THE LIBRARY


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B E B    E,
OR
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.




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GRANVILLE DIM VIGNE
STRATHMORE.       0
CHANDOS.
IDALIA..
UNDER Two FLAGS
TRICOTRIN.
PUCK..
FOLLE-FAR.INE,.
PASCAREL.
Two LITTLE WOODEN SHOES
CECIL CASTLEMAINE'S GAGE
RANDOLPHi GORDON
BEATRICE BOVILLE


TORIKS.


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50


A LEAF IN THE STORM (8VO.


I


These Novels are universally acknowledged to be the. most
powerful and fascinating works of fiction which the present
century, so prolific in light reading, has produced.
The above are handsomely and uniformly bound in cloth,
l2mo form, and are for sale by booksellers generally, or will
be sent by mail, postage paid, on receipt of price by
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., PUBLIsHEMs,
715 and 717 Market St., Philadelphia.




BI BfE
OR
TW)ITEWOE SHOES


A STORY.
AUTHOR OF "STRATHMORE" "TRICOTRIN, "UNDER TWO FLAGS,
"IDALIA, ~PASCAREL, ETC.
PHILADELPHIA:
J. 13. LIPPINCOTT & CO.
1874.




A"I
I




CfB
TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
CHAPTER I.
EBEE sprang out of bed at daybreak. She
was sixteen.
It seemed a very wonderful thing to be
as much as that-sixteen-a woman quite.
A cock was crowing under her lattice-he said
how old you are!-how old you are!-every time
that he sounded his clarion.
She opened the lattice and wished him good-day,
with a laugh. It was so pleasant to be woke by
him and to think that no one in all the world could
' ever call one a child any more.
There was a kid bleating in the shed. There
was a thrush singing in the dusk of the sycamoreleaves. There was a calf lowing to its mother
- away there beyond the fence. There were dreamy
muffled bells ringing in the distance from many
~ steeples and belfries where the city was; they all, said one thing: "How good it is to be so old as
L that-how good, how very good!"
9


1042682




10      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


B4bde was very pretty.
No one in all Brabant ever denied that. To
look at her it seemed as if she had so lived among
the flowers that she had grown like them, and only
looked a bigger blossom-that was all.
She wore two little wooden shoes and a little
cotton cap, and a gray kirtle-linen in summer,
serge in winter; but the little feet in the shoes
were like rose-leaves, and the cap was as white as
a lily, and the gray kirtle was like the bark of the
bough that the apple-blossom parts, and peeps out
of, to blush in the sun.
The flowers had been the only godmothers that
she had ever had, and fairy godmothers too.
The marigolds and the sunflowers had given her
their ripe, rich gold to tint her hair; the lupins
and irises had lent their azure. to her eyes; the
moss-rose buds had made her pretty mouth; the
arum lilies had uncurled their softness for her skin;
and the lime-blossoms had given her their frank,
fresh, innocent fragrance.
The winds had blown, and the rains had rained,
and the sun had shone on her, indeed, and had
warmed the whiteness of her limbs, but they had
only given to her body and her soul a hardy, breezeblown freshness like that of a field cowslip.
She had never been called anything but Bebee.
One summer day Antoine Mies-a French subject, but a Belgian by adoption and habit, an old
man who got his meagre living by tilling the garden-plot about his hut and selling flowers in the




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


11


city squares-Antoine, going into Brussels for his
day's trade, had seen a gray bundle floating among
the water-lilies in the bit of water near his hut and
had hooked it out to land, and found a year-old
child in it, left to drown, no doubt, but saved by
the lilies, and laughing gleefully at fate.
Some lace-worker, blind with the pain of toil, or
some peasant woman harder of heart than the oxen
in her yoke, had left it there to drift away to death,
not reckoning for the inward ripple of the current
or the toughness of the lily-leaves and stems.
Old Antoine took it to his wife, and the wife, a
childless and aged soul, begged leave to keep it;
and the two poor lonely, simple folks grew to
care for the homeless, motherless thing, and they
and the people about all called it Bebee-only
Bebee.
The church got at it and added to it a saint's
name; but for all its little world it remained Bebee
-Bebee when it trotted no higher than the red
carnation-heads;-Be'bee when its yellow  curls
touched as high as the lavender-bush;-Bebee on
this proud day when the thrush's song and the
cock's crow found her sixteen years old.
Old Antoine's hut stood in a little patch of
garden ground with a brier hedge all round it,
in that byway which lies between Laeken and
Brussels, in the heart of flat, green Brabant,
where there are beautiful meadows and tall,
flowering hedges, and forest-trees, and fern-filled
ditches, and a little piece of water, deep and cool,




12      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


where the swans sail all day long, and the silvery
willows dip and sway with the wind.
Turn aside from the highway, and there it lies
to-day, and all the place brims over with grass, and
boughs, and blossoms, and flowering beans, and
wild dog-roses; and there are a few cottages and
cabins there near the pretty water, and farther
there is an old church, sacred to St. Guido; and
beyond go the green level country and the endless wheat-fields, and the old mills with their red
sails against the sun; and beyond all these the
pale blue, sea-like horizon of the plains of Flanders.
It was a pretty little hut, pink all over like a
sea-shell, in the fashion that the Netherlanders love;
and its two little square lattices were dark with
creeping plants and big rose-bushes, and its roof,
so low that you could touch it, was golden and
green with all the lichens and stoneworts that are
known on earth.
Here Bebee grew from year to year; and soon
learned to be big enough and hardy enough to tie
up bunches of stocks and pinks for the market,
and then to carry a basket for herself, trotting by
Antoine's side along the green roadway and into
the white, wide streets; and in the market the
buyers-most often of all when they were young
mothers-would seek out the little golden head
and the beautiful frank blue eyes, and buy Bebee's
lilies and carnations whether they wanted them or
not. So that old Maes used to cross himself and




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


13


say that, thanks to Our Lady, trade was thrice as
stirring since the little one had stretched out her
rosy fingers with the flowers.
All the same, however stirring trade might be
in summer, when the long winters came and the
Montagne de la Cour was a sharp slope of ice, and
the pinnacles of St. Gudule were all frosted white
with snow, and the hot-house flowers alone could
fill the market, and the country gardens were
bitter black wind-swept desolations where the
chilly roots huddled themselves together underground like homeless children in a cellar,-then
the money gained in the time of leaf and blossom
was all needed to buy a black loaf and fagot of
wood; and many a day in the little pink hut B6bee
rolled herself up in her bed like a dormouse, to
forget in sleep that she was supperless and as cold
as a frozen robin.
So that when Antoine Mies grew sick and died,
more from age and weakness than any real disease,
there were only a few silver crowns in the brown
jug hidden in the thatch; and the hut itself, with
its patch of ground, was all that he could leave to
Bebee.
"Live in it, little one, and take nobody in it to
worry you, and be good to the bird and the goat,
and be sure to keep the flowers blowing," said the
old man with his last breath; and sobbing her
heart out by his bedside, Bebee vowed to do his
bidding.
She was not quite fourteen then, and when she
2




14      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


had laid her old friend to rest in the rough green
graveyard about St. Guido, she was very sorrowful and lonely —poor little, bright Bebee, who had
never hardly known a worse woe than to run the
thorns of the roses into her fingers, or to cry because a thrush was found starved to death il the
snow.
Bebee went home, and sat down in a corner and
thought.
The hut was her own, and her own the little
green triangle just then crowded with its Mayday
blossom in all the colors of the rainbow. She was
to live in it, and never let the flowers die-so he
had said; good, rough old ugly Antoine Miies, who
had been to her as father, mother, country, king,
and law.
The sun was shining.
Through the little square of the lattice she could
see the great tulips opening in the grass and a bough
of the apple-tree swaying in the wind. A chaffinch
clung to the bough, and swung to and fro singing.
The door stood open, with the broad, bright day
beaming through; and Bebee's little world came
streaming in with it-the world which dwelt in the
half-dozen cottages that fringed this green lane of
hers like beavers'-nests pushed out under the leaves
on to the water's edge.
They came in, six or eight of them, all wonmen;
trim, clean, plain Brabant peasants, hard working,
kindly of nature, and shrewd in their own simple
matters; people who labored in the fields all the




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


15


day long, or worked themselves blind over the lace
pillows in the city.
"You are too young to live alone, Bebee," said
the first of them. " My old mother shall come and
keep house for you."
"Nay-better come and live with me, Bebee,"
said the second. "I will give you bit and drop, and
clothing, too, for the right to your plot of ground."
"That is to cheat her,"'said the third. " Iark
here, Bebee: my sister, who is a lone woman, as
you know well, shall come and bide with you, and
ask you nothing-nothing at all-only you shall
just give her a crust, perhaps, and a few flowers to
sell sometimes."
"No, no," said the fourth; "that will not do.
You let me have the garden and the hut, Bebee,
and my sons shall till the place for you; and I will
live with you myself, and leave the boys the cabin
-so you will have all the gain, do you not see,
dear little one?"
" Pooh!" said the fifth, stouter and better clothed
than the rest. "You are all eager for your own
good, not for hers. Now I-Father Francis says
we should all do as we would be done by-I will take
Bebee to live with me, all for nothing; and we will
root the flowers up and plant it with good cabbages
and potatoes and salad plants. And I will stable
my cows in the hut to sweeten it after a dead man,
and I will take my chance of making money out of
it, and no one can speak nore fair than that when
one sees what weather is, and thinks what insects




16      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


do; and all the year round, winter and summer,
Bebebe here will want for nothing, and have to take
no care for herself whatever."
She who spoke, MWre Krebs, was the best-to-do
woman in the little lane, having two cows of her
own and ear-rings of solid silver, and a green cart,
and a big dog that took the milk into Brussels.
She was heard, therefore, with respect, and a short
silence followed her words.
But it was very short; and a hubbub of voices
crossed each other after it as the speakers grew
hotter against one another and more eager to convince each other of the disinterestedness and delicacy of their offers of aid.
Through it all Bebee sat quite quiet on the edge
of the little truckle-bed, with her eyes fixed on the
apple-bough and the singing chaffinch.
She heard them all patiently.
They were all her good friends, friends old and
true. This one had given her cherries a score of
summers. That other had bought her a little waxen
Jesus at the Kermesse. The old woman in the blue
linen skirt had taken her to her first communion.
She who wanted her sister to have the crust and
the flowers, had brought her a beautiful painted
book of hours that had cost a whole franc. Another
had given her the solitary wonder, travel, and
foreign feast of her whole life-a day fifteen miles
away at the fair at Mechlin. The last speaker of
all had danced her on her knee a hundred times in
babyhood, and told her legends, and let her ride




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SIOED'.


17


in the green cart behind big curly-coated Tambour.
Bebee did not doubt that these trusty old fi'iends
meant well by her, and yet a certain heavy sense
fell on her that in all these counsels there was not
the same whole-hearted and frank goodness that
had prompted the gifts to her of the waxen Jesus,
and the Kermesse of Mechlin.
Bebee did not reason, because she was too little
a thing and too trustful; but she felt, in a vague,
sorrowful fashion, that they were all of them
trying to make some benefit out of her poor little
heritage, with small regard for herself at the root
of their speculations.
Bebee was a child; wholly a child; body and
soul were both as fresh in her as a golden crocus
just born out of the snows. But she was not a
little fool, thofgh people sometimes called her so
because she would sit in the moments of her
leisure with her blue eyes on the far-away clouds
like a thing in a dream.
She heard them patiently till the cackle of shrill
voices had exhausted itself, and the six women
stood on the sunny mud floor of the hut eyeing
each other with venomous glances; for though they
were good neighbors at all times, each, in this matter, was hungry for the advantages to be got out
of old Antoine's plot of ground. They were very
poor; they toiled in the scorched or frozen fields
all weathers, or spent from dawn to nightfall pouring over their cobweb lace; and to save a sou or
2*               B




18      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


gain a cabbage was of moment to them only second
to the keeping of their souls secure of heaven by
Lenten mass and Easter psalm.
Bebee listened to them all, and the tears dried
on her cheeks, and her pretty rosebud lips curled
close in one another.
" You are very good, no doubt, all of you," she
said at last. "But I cannot tell you that I am
thankful, for my heart is like a stone, and I think
it is not so very much for me as it is for the hut
that you are speaking. Perhaps it is wrong in me
to say so-yes, I am wrong, I am sure,-you are
all kind, and I am only Bebee. But you see he
told me to live here and take care of the flowers,
and I must do it, that is certain. I will ask Father
Francis, if you wish; but if he tells me I am
wrong, as you do, I shall stay here all the same."
And in answer to their expostulations and condemnation, she only said the same thing over again
always, in different words, but to the same steadfast purpose. The women clamored about her for
an hour in reproach and rebuke; she was a baby
indeed, she was a little fool, she was a naughty,
obstinate child, she was an ungrateful willful little
creature, who ought to be beaten till she was blue,
if only there was anybody that had the right to
do it!
"But there is nobody that has the right," said
Bebee, getting angry and standing upright on the
floor, with Antoine's old gray cat in her round
arms. "He told me to stay here, and he would




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


19


not have said so if it had been wrong; and I am
old enough to do for myself, and I am not afraid,
and who is there that would hurt me? Oh, yes;
go and tell Father Francis, if you like. I do not
believe he will blame me, but if he do, I must
bear it. Even if he shut the church door on me,
I will obey Antoine, and the flowers will know I
am right, and they will let no evil spirits touch me,
for the flowers are strong for that; they talk to the
angels in the night."
What use was it to argue with a little idiot like
this? Indeed, peasants never do argue; they use
abuse.
It is their only form of logic.
They used it to Bebee, rating her soundly, as became people who were old enough to be her grandmothers, and who knew that she had been raked
out of their own pond, and had no more real place
in creation than a water-rat, as one might say.
The women were kindly, and had never thrown
this truth against her before, and in fact, to be a
foundling was no sort of disgrace to their sight;
but anger is like wine, and makes the depths of the
mind shine clear, and all the mud that is in the
depths stink in the light; and in their wrath at not
sharing Antoine's legacy, the good souls said bitter
things that in calm moments they would no more
have uttered than they would have taken up a knife
to slit her throat.
They talked themselves hoarse with impatience
and chagrin, and went backwards over the thresh



20      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


old, their wooden shoes and their shrill voices keeping a clattering chorus. By this time it was evening; the sun had gone off the floor, and the bird
had done singing.
Bebee stood in the same place, hardening her
little heart, whilst big and bitter tears swelled into
her eyes, and fell on the soft fur of the sleeping cat.
She only very vaguely understood why it was in
any sense shameful to have been raked out of the
water-lilies like a drowning field-mouse, as they had
said it was.
She and Antoine had often talked of that summer
morning when he had found her there among the
leaves, and Bebe and he had laughed over it gayly,
and she had been quite proud in her innocent
fashion that she had had a fairy and the flowers for
her mother and godmothers, which Antoine always
told her was the case beyond any manner of doubt.
Even Father Francis, hearing the pretty harmless
fiction, had never deemed it his duty to disturb
her pleasure in it, being a good, cheerful old man,
who thought that woe and wisdom both come soon
enough to bow young shoulders and to silver young
curls without his interference.
Bebee had always thought it quite a fine thing to
have been born of water-lilies, with the sun for her
father, and when people in Brussels had asked her
of her parentage, seeing her stand in the market
with a certain look on her that was not like other
children, had always gravely answered in the purest
good faith,



TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


21


"My mother was a flower."
"You are a flower, at any rate," they would say
in return; and Bebee had been always quite content.
But now she was doubtful; she was rather perplexed than sorrowful.
These good friends of hers seemed to see some
new sin about her. Perhaps, after all, thought
Bebee, it might have been better to have had a
human mother who would have taken care of her
now that old Antoine was dead, instead of those
beautiful, gleaming, cold water-lilies which went to
sleep on their green velvet beds, and did not certainly care when the thorns ran into her fingers, or
the pebbles got in her wooden shoes.
In some vague way, disgrace and envy-the twin
Discords of the world-touched her innocent cheek
with their hot breath, and as the evening fell, Bebee
felt very lonely and a little wistful.
She had been always used to run out in the
pleasant twilight-time among the flowers and
water them, Antoine filling the can from the well;
and the neighbors would come and lean against
the little low wall, knitting and gossiping; and
the big dogs, released from harness, would poke
their heads through the wicket for a crust; and the
children would dance and play Colin Maillard on
the'green by the water, and she, when the flowers
were no longer thirsted, would join them, and romp
and dance and sing the gayest of them all.
But now the buckets hung at the bottom of the




22      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


well, and the flowers hungered in vain, and the
neighbors held aloof, and she shut-to the hut door
and listened to the rain which began to fall, and
cried herself to sleep all alone in her tiny kingdom.
When the dawn came the sun rose red and
warm; the grass and boughs sparkled; a lark
sang; Bebee awoke sad in heart, indeed, for her
lost old friend, but brighter and braver.
"Each of them wants to get something out of
me," thought the child. " Well, I will live alone,
then, and do my duty, just as he said. The flowers
will never let any real harm come, though they do
look so indifferent and smiling sometimes, and
though not one of them hung their heads when his
coffin was carried through them yesterday."
That want of sympathy in the flowers troubled
her.
The old man had loved them so well; and they
had all looked as glad as ever, and had laughed
saucily in the sun, and not even a rosebud turned
the paler as the poor still stiffened limbs went by
in the wooden shell.
"I suppose God cares-but I wish they did,"
said Bebee, to whom the garden was more intelligible than Providence.
" Why do you not care?" she asked the pinks,
shaking the rain-drops off their curled rosy petals.
The pinks leaned lazily against their sticks, and
seemed to say, " Why should we care for anything,
unless a slug be eating us?-that is real woe, if
you like."




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


23


Bebee, without her sabots on, wandered thoughtfully among the sweet wet sunlightened labyrinths
of blossom, her pretty bare feet treading the
narrow grassy paths with pleasure in their coolness.
" He -was so good to you," she said reproachfully
to the great gaudy gillyflowers and the painted
sweet-peas.  "He never let you know heat or
cold-he never let the worm gnaw or the snail
harm you;-he would get up in the dark to see
after your wants,-and when the ice froze over
you, he was there to loosen your chains. Why do
you not care, any one of you?"
"IHow silly you are!" said the flowers. "You
must be a butterfly or a poet, Bebee, to be as foolish as that. Some one will do all he did. We are
of market value, you know. Care, indeed!-when
the sun is so warm, and there is not an earwig in
the place to trouble us."
The flowers were not always so selfish as this;
and perhaps the sorrow in Bebee's heart made
their callousness seem harder than it really was.
When we suffer very much ourselves, anything
that smiles in the sun seems cruel-a child, a bird,
a dragon-fly-nay, even a fluttering ribbon, or a
spear-grass that waves in the wind.
There was a little shrine at the corner of the
garden, set into the wall; a niche with a bit of
glass and a picture of the Virgin, so battered that
no one could trace any feature of it.
It had been there for centuries, and was held in




24      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


great veneration; and old Antoine had always cut
the choicest buds of his roses and s6t them in a
delf pot in front of it every other morning all the
summer long.   Bebee, whose religion was the
sweetest, vaguest mingling of Pagan and Christian myths, and whose faith in fairies and in saints
was exactly equal in strength and in ignoranceBebe6e filled the delf pot anew carefully, then knelt
down on the turf in that little green corner, and
prayed in devout hopeful childish good faith to
the awful unknown Powers who were to her only
as gentle guides and kindly playmates.
Was she too familiar with the Holy Mother?
She was almost fearful that she was; but then
the Holy Mother loved flowers so well, Bebee
would not feel aloof from her, nor be afraid.
" When one cuts the best blossoms for her, and
tries to be good, and never tells a lie," thought
Bebee, "I am quite sure, as she loves the lilies,
that she will never altogether forget me."
So she said to the Mother of Christ fearlessly, and
nothing doubting; and then rose for her daily work
of cutting the flowers for the market in Brussels.
By the time her baskets were full, her fowls fed,
her goat foddered, her starling's cage cleaned, her
hut door locked, and her wooden shoes clattering on the sunny road into the city, Bebee was
almost content again, though ever and again, as she
trod the familiar ways, the tears dimmed her eyes
as she remembered that old Antoine would never
again hobble over the stones beside her.




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


25


"You are a little willful one, and too young to
live alone," said Father Francis, meeting her in
the lane.
But he did not scold her seriously; and she kept
to her resolve; and the women, who were good at
heart, took her back into favor again; and so
Bebee had her own way, and the fairies, or the
saints, or both together, took care of her; and so
it came to pass that all alone she heard the cock
crow whilst it was dark, and woke to the grand
and amazing truth that this warm, fragrant, dusky
June morning found her full sixteen years old.


8




CHAPTER II.
IIE two years had not been all playtime,
any more than they had been all summer.
When one has not father, or mother, or
brother, and all one's friends have barely bread
enough for themselves, life cannot be very easy,
nor its crusts very many at any time.
Bebee had a cherub's mouth, and a dreamer's
eyes, and a poet's thoughts sometimes in her own
untaught and unconscious fashion.
But all the same she was a little hard-working
Brabant peasant girl; up whilst the birds twittered
in the dark; to bed when the red sun sank beyond
the far blue line of the plains; she hoed, and dug,
and watered, and planted her little plot; she kept
her cabin as clean as a fresh-blossomed primrose;
she milked her goat, and swept her floor; she sat,
all the warm days, in the town, selling her flowers,
and in the winter-time, when her garden yielded
her nothing, she strained her sight over lace-making
in the city to get the small bit'of food that stood
between her and that hunger which to the poor
means death.
A hard life: very hard when hail and snow made
26




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


27


the streets of Brussels like slopes of ice; a little hard
even in the gay summer-time when she sat under
the awning fronting the Maison du Roi; but all the
time the child throve on it, and was happy, and
dreamed of many graceful and gracious things
whilst she was weeding among her lilies, or tracing
the threads to and fro on her lace pillow.
Now-when she woke to the full sense of her
wonderful sixteen years-Bebee, standing barefoot
on the mud-floor, was as pretty a sight as was to be
seen betwixt Scheldt and Rhine.
The sun had only left a soft warmth like an
apricot's on her white skin. Ier limbs, though
strong as a mountain pony's, were slender and well
shaped. Ier hair curled in shiny crumpled masses,
and tumbled about her shoulders. Ier pretty
round plump little breast was white as the lilies in
the grass without, and in this blooming time of her
little life Bebee, in her way, was beautiful as a
peach-bloom is beautiful, and her innocent, courageous, happy eyes had dreams in them underneath
their laughter-dreams that went farther than the
green woods of Laeken, farther even than the white
clouds of summer.
She could not move among them idly as poets
and girls love to do; she had to be active amidst
them, else drought and rain, and worm and snail,
and blight and fiost would have made havoc of
their fairest hopes.
The loveliest love is that which dreams high
above all storms, unsoiled by all burdens; but per





28       TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
haps the strongest love is that which, whilst it
adores, drags its feet through mire, and burns its
brow in heat, for the thing beloved.
So Bebee dreamed in her garden; but all the time
for sake of it hoed and dug, and hurt her hands,
and tired her limbs, and bowed her shoulders under
the great metal pails from the well.
This wondrous morning, with the bright burden
of her sixteen years upon her, she dressed herself
quickly and fed her fowls, and, happy as a bird,
went to sit on her little wooden stool in the doorway.
There had been fresh rain in the night: the garden was radiant; the smell of the wet earth was
sweeter than all perfumes that are burned in
palaces.
The dripping rosebuds nodded against her hair
as she went out; the starling called to her"Bebe'e, Bebee —bonjour, bonjour." These were all
the words it knew. It said the same words a thousand times a week. But to 3ebee it seemed that
the starling most certainly knew that she was sixteen years old that day.
Breaking her bread into the milk, she sat in
the dawn and thought, without knowing that she
thought it, " Iow good it is to live when one is
young!"
Old people say the same thing often, but they
sigh when they say it. Bebee smiled.
Mere Krebs opened her door in the next cottage,
and nodded over the wall.




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


29


"What a fine thing to be sixteen!-a merry
year, Bebee."
Marthe, the carpenter's wife, came out frdm her
gate, broom in hand.
"The Holy Saints keep you, Bebee; why, you
are quite a woman now!"
The little children of Varnhart, the charcoalburner, who were as poor as any mouse in the old
churches, rushed out of their little home up the
lane, bringing with them a cake stuck full of sugar
and seeds, and tied round with a blue ribbon, that
their mother had made that very week, all in her
honor.
"Only see, Bebee! Such a grand cake!" they
shouted, dancing down the lane. "Jules picked
the plums, and Jeanne washed the almonds, and
Christine took the ribbon off her own communion
cap-all for you-all for you; but you will let us
come and eat it too?"
Old gran'mere Bishot, who was- the oldest
woman about Laeken, hobbled through the grass
on her crutches and nodded her white shaking
head, and smiled at Bebee.
"I have nothing to give you, little one-except
my blessing, if you care for that."
Bebee ran out, breaking from the children, and
knelt down in the wet grass, and bent her pretty
sunny head to the benediction.
Trine, the miller's wife, the richest woman of
them all, called to the child from the steps of the
mill,3*




80      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


"A  merry year, and the blessing of Heaven,
Bebee! Come up, and here is my first dish of
cherries for you; not tasted one myself; they will
make you a feast with Varnhart's cake, though
she should have known better, so poor as she is.
Charity begins at home, and these children's
stomachs are empty."
Bebee ran up and then down again gleefully,
with her lapful of big black cherries; Tambour,
the old white dog, who had used to drag her about
in his milk-cart, leaping on her in sympathy and
congratulation.
" What a supper we will have!" she cried to the
charcoal-burner's children, who were turning summersaults in the dock-leaves, while the swans stared
and hissed.
When one is sixteen, cherries and a cake have
a flavor of Paradise still, especially when they are
tasted twice, or thrice at most, in all the year.
An old man called to her as she went by his
door. All these little cabins lie close together,
with only their apple-trees, or their tall beans, or
their hedges of thorn between them; you may
ride by and never notice them if you do not look
for them under the leaves closely, as you would
for thrushes'-nests.
He, too, was very old; a life-long neighbor and
gossip of Antoine's; he had been a day-laborer
in these same fields all his years, and had never
traveled farther than where the red mill-sails
turned among the colza and the corn.




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


31


"Come in, my pretty one, for a second," he
whispered, with an air of mystery that made
Bebee's heart quicken with expectancy. "Come
in; I have something for you. They were my
dead daughter's-you have heard me talk of her
-Lisette, who died forty year or more ago, they
say; for me I think it was yesterday. Mere Krebs
-she is a hard woman-heard me talking of my
girl. She burst out laughing, Lord's sake, fool,
why, your girl would be sixty now an she had
lived.' Well, so it may be; you see, the new mill
was put up the week she died, and you call the
new mill old; but, my girl, she is young to me.
Always young. Come here, Bebee."
Bebee went after him, a little awed, into the
dusky interior, that smelt of stored apples and of
dried herbs that hung from the roof. There was
a walnut-wood press, such as the peasants of
France and the low countries keep their homespun linen in and their old lace that serves for the
nuptials and baptisms of half a score of generations.
The old man unlocked it with a trembling hand,
and there came from it an odor of dead lavender
and of withered rose-leaves.
On the shelves there were a girl's set of clothes,
and a girl's sabots, and a girl's communion veil
and wreath.
"They are all hers," he whispered; "all hers.
And sometimes in the evening-time I see her coming along the lane. for them-do you not know?




82      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


There is nothing changed; nothing changed; the
grass, and the trees, and the huts, and the pond
are all here-why should she only be gone
away?"
"Antoine is gone."
"'Yes. But he was old; my girl is young."
lie stood a moment, with the press door open,
a perplexed trouble in his dim eyes; the divine
faith of love and the mule-like stupidity of ignorance made him cling to this one thought without
power of judgment in it.
"They say she would be sixty," he said, with a
little dreary smile.  "But that is absurd, you
know. Why, she had cheeks like yours, and she
would run —no lapwing could fly faster over corn.
These are her things, you see; yes-all of them.
That is the sprig of sweetbrier she wore in her
belt the day before the wagon knocked her down
and killed her. I have never touched the things.
But look here, Bebee, you are a good child and
true, and like her just a little. I mean to give
you her silver clasps.  They were her greatgreat-great-grandmother's before her. God knows
how old they are not. And a girl should have
some little wealth of that sort-and for Antoine's
sake   "
The old man stayed behind, closing the press
door upon the lavender-scented clothes, and sitting
down in the dull shadow of the hut to think of his
daughter, dead forty summers and more.
Bebee went out with the brave broad silver




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


clasps about her waist, and the tears wet on her
cheeks for a grief not her own.
To be killed just when one was young, and was
loved like that, and all the world was in its Mayday flower! The silver felt cold to her touch-as
cold as though it were the dead girl's hands that
held her.
The garlands that the children strung of daisies
and hung about her had never chilled her so.
But little Jeanne, the youngest of the charcoalburner's little tribe, running to meet her, screamed
with glee, and danced in the gay morning.
" Oh, Bebe e! how you glitter! Did the Virgin
send you that off her own altar? Let me seelet me touch! Is it made of the stars or of the
sun?"
And Bebee danced with the child, and the silver
gleamed and sparkled, and all the people came
running out to see, and the milk-carts were half
an hour later for town, and the hens cackled loud
unfed, and the men even stopped on their way to
the fields and paused, with their scythes on their
shoulders, to stare at the splendid gift.
"There is not such another set of clasps in
Brabant; old work you could make a fortune of
in the curiosity-shops in the Montagne," said
Trine Krebs, going up the steps of her mill-house.
" But, all the same, you know, Bebee, things cft a
dead body bring mischance sometimes."
But Bebee danced with the child, and did not
hear.
c




34      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


Whose fete day had ever begun like this one of
hers?
She was a little poet at heart, and should not
have cared for such vanities; but when one is
only sixteen, and has only a little rough woolen
frock, and sits in the market-place or the laceroom, with other girls around, how should one be
altogether indifferent to a broad, embossed, beautiful shield of silver that sparkled with each step
one took?
A quarter of an hour idle thus was all, however,
that Bebbe or her friends could spare at five o'clock
on a summer morning, when the city was waiting
for its eggs, its honey, its flowers, its cream, and
its butter, and Tambour was shaking his leather
harness in impatience to be off with his milk-cans.
So Bebee, all holiday though it was, and heroine
though she felt herself, ran in-doors, put up her
cakes and cherries, cut her two basketfuls out of
the garden, locked her hut, and went on her quick
and happy little feet along the grassy paths toward
the city.
The sorting and tying up of the flowers she
always left until she was sitting under the awning
in front of the Broodhuis; the same awning, tawny
as an autumn pear and weather-blown as an old
sail, which had served to shelter Antoine Maes
from heat and rain through all the years of his
life.
"Go to the Madeleine; you will make money
there, with your pretty blue eyes, Bebee," people




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


85


had said to her of late; but Bebee had shaken her
head.
Where she had sat in her babyhood at Antoine's
feet, she would sit so long as she sold flowers in
Brussels-here, underneath the shadow of the
Gothic towers that saw Egmont die.
Old Antoine had never gone into the grand
market that is fashioned after the Madeleine of
Paris, and whlere in the cool, wet, sweet-smelling
halls, all the flowers of Brabant are spread in bouquets fit for the bridal of Una, and large as the
shield of the Red-Cross Knight.
Antoine could not compete with all those treasures of greenhouse and stove. He had always had
his little stall among those which spread their
tawny awnings and their merry hardy blossoms
under the shadow of the Hotel de Ville, in the
midst of the buyings and sellings, the games and
the quarrels, the auctions and the Cheap Johns,
the mountebank, and the marriage-parties, that
daily and hourly throng the Grande Place.
Here Bebee, from three years old, had been
used to sit beside him. By nature she was as gay
as a lark. The people always heard her singing as
they passed the garden. The children never found
their games so merry as when she danced their
rounds with them; and though she dreamed so
much out there in the air among the carnations
and the roses, or in the long, low work-room in the
town, high against the crocketed pinnacles of the
cathedral, yet her dreams, if vaguely wistful, were




36      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


all bright of hue and sunny in their phantasies.
Still, Bebee had one sad unsatisfied desire: she
wanted to know so much, and she knew nothing.
She did not care for the grand gay people.
When the band played, and the park filled, and
the bright little cafes were thronged with pleasureseekers, 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 charsA-bancs trundled away into the forest with laughing loads of students and maidens; when in the
rough winters the carriages left furred and jeweled
women at the doors of the operas or the palacesBebee, going and coming through the city to her
flower-stall or lace-work, looked at them all, aud
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




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


87


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 its ways and wiles of Paris. It decks
itself with white and gold. It has music under its
trees and soldiers in its streets, and troops marching and countermarching along its sunny avenues.
It has blue and pink, and yellow and green, on its
4




38      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


awnings and on its house-fronts. It has a merry
open-air life on its pavements at little marble tables
before little gay-colored cafes. It has gilded balconies, and tossing flags, and comic operas, and
leisurely pleasure-seekers, and tries always to believe and make the world believe that it is Paris
in very truth.
But this is only the Brussels of the noblesse and
the foreigners.
There is a Brussels that is better than this-a
Brussels that belongs to the old burgher-life, to the
artists and the craftsmen, to the master-masons of
the lMoyel-ge, to the same spirit and soul that once
filled the free men of Ghent and the citizens of
Bruges and the besieged of Leyden, and the blood
of Egrnont and of Horne.
Down there by the water-side, where the old
quaint walls lean over the yellow sluggish stream,
and the green barrels of the Antwerp barges swing
against the dusky piles of the crumbling bridges.
In the gray square desolate courts of the old palaces, where in cobwebbed galleries and silent chambers the Flemish tapestries drop to pieces.'
In the great populous square, where, above tile
clamorous and rushing crowds, the majestic firolt
of the Maison du Roi frowns against the sun, and
the spires and pinnacles of the Burgoniaster's
gatheringl-halls tower into the sky in all the fantastic lllxuriance of Gothic fancy.
Under the vast shadowy wings of angels in the
stillness of the cathedral, across whose sunny aisles




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


39


some little child goes slowly all alone, laden with
lilies for the Feast of the Assumption, till their
white glory hides its curly head.
In all strange quaint old-world niches withdrawn
from men in silent grass grown corners, where a
twelfth-century corbel holds a pot of roses, or a
Gothic arch yawns beneath a wool-warehouse, or a
water-spout with a grinning faun's head laughs in
the grim humor of the Moyen-age above the bent
head of a young lace-worker.
In all these, Brussels, though more worldly than
her sisters of Ghent and Bruges, and far more
worldly yet than her Teuton cousins of Freiburg
and Niurnberg, is still in her own way like as a
monkish story mixed up with the Roraunt of the
Rose; or rather like some gay French vaudeville,
all fashion and jest, illustrated in old Missal manner witli helm and hauberk, cope and cowl, praying knights and fighting priests, winged griffinls
and ninibused saints, flame-breathing dragons and
enamored princes, all mingled together in the
illuminated colors and the heroical grotesque romance of the Middle Ages.
And it was this side of the city that Bebee
knew; and she loved it well, and would not leave
it for the market of the Madeleine.
She had no one to tell her anything, and all
Antoine had ever been able to say to her concerning the Broodhuis was that it had been there in
his father's time; and regarding St. Gudule, that
his mother had burned many a candle before its




40      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


altars for a dead brother who had been drowned
off the dunes.
But the child's mind, unled, but not misled, had
pondered on these things, and her heart had grown
to love them; and perhaps no student of Spanish
architecture, no antiquary of Moyeun-ge relics,
loved St. Gudule and the Broodhuis as little
ignorant Bebee did.
There had been a time when great dark, fierce
men had builded these things, and made the place
beautiful. So much she knew; and the little wistful, untaught brain tried to project itself into those
unknown times, and failed, and yet found pleasure
in the effort. And Be6be would say to herself as
she walked the streets, "Perhaps some one will
come some day who will tell me all those things."
Meanwhile, there were the flowers, and she was
quite content.
Besides, she knew all the people: the old cobbler, who sat next her, and chattered all day long
like a magpie; the tinker, who had come up many
a summer night to drink a glass with Antoine;
the Cheap John, who cheated everybody else, but
who had always given her a toy or a trinket at
every Fete Dieu all the summers she had known;
the little old woman, sour as a crab, who sold
rosaries and pictures of saints, and little waxen
Christs upon a tray; the big dogs who pulled the
carts in, and lay panting all day under the rushbottomed chairs on which the egg-wives and the
fruit-sellers sat, and knitted, and chaffered; nay,




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


41


even the gorgeous huissier and the frowning gendarme, who marshaled the folks into order as
they went up for municipal registries, or for townmisdemeanors. She knew them all; had known
them all ever since she had first trotted in like a
little dog at Antoine's heels.
So B1ebee stayed there.
It is, perhaps, the most beautiful square in all
Northern Europe, with its black timbers and gilded
carvings, and blazoned windows, and majestic
scutcheons, and fantastic pinnacles. That Bebe
did not know, but she loved it, and she sat resolutely in front of the Broodhuis, selling her flowers,
smiling, chatting, helping the old woman, counting
her little gains, eating her bit of bread at noonday
like any other market-girl, but at times glancing
up to the stately towers and the blue sky, with a
look on her face that made the old tinker and
cobbler whisper together, "What does she see
there?-the dead people or the angels?"
The truth was that even Bebe6e herself did not
know very surely what she saw-something that
was still nearer to her than even this kindly crowd
that loved her. That was all she could have said
had anybody asked her.
But none did.
No one wanted to hear what the dead said; and
for the angels, the tinker and the cobbler were of
opinion that one had only too much of them sculptured about everywhere, and shining on all the
casements-in reverence be it spoken, of course.
4*




CHAPTER III.


<   REMIEMBERED it was your name-d
child.  Here are half a dozen eggs,"
said one of the hen-wives; and the little
cross woman with the peddler's tray added a waxen
St. Agnes, colored red and yellow to the very life
no doubt; and the old Cheap John had saved her
a cage for the starling; and the tinker had a creamcheese for her in a vine-leaf, and the sweetmeatseller brought her a beautiful gilded horn of sugarplums, and the cobbler had made her actually a
pair of shoes-red shoes, beautiful shoes to go to
mass in and be a wonder in to all the neighborhood. And they thronged round her, and adored
the silver waist-buckles; and when Bebee got
fairly to her stall, and traffic began, she thought
once more that nobody's feast-day had ever
dawned like hers.
When the chimes began to ring all over the city,
she could hardly believe that the carillon was not
saying its " Laus Deo" with some special meaning
in its bells of her.
The morning went by as usual; the noise of the
throngs about her like a driving of angry winds,
but no more hurting her than the angels on the
42




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


43


roof of St. Gudule are hurt by the storm when it
breaks.
Hard words, fierce passions, low thoughts, evil
deeds, passed by the child without resting on her;
her heart was in her flowers, and was like one of
them with the dew of daybreak on it.
There were many strangers in the city, and such
are always sure to loiter in the Spanish square;
and she sold fast and well her lilacs and her roses,
and her knots of thyme and sweet-brier.
She was always a little sorry to see them go, her
kindly pretty playmates that, nine times out of ten
no doubt, only drooped and died in the lands that
purchased them, as human souls soil and shrivel
in the grasp of the passions that woo them.
The day was a busy one, and brought in good
profit. Bebee had no less than fifty sous in her
leather pouch when it was over,-a sumn of magnitude in the green lane by Laeken.
A few of her moss-roses were still unsold, that
was all, when the Ave Maria began ringing over
the town and the people dispersed to their homes
or their pleasuring.
It was a warm gray evening: the streets were
full; there were blossoms in all the balconies, and
gay colors in all the dresses. The old tinker put
his tools together, and whispered to her," Bebee, as it is your feast-day, come and stroll
in St. Hubert's gallery, and I will buy you a little
gilt heart, or a sugar-apple stick, or a ribbon, and
we can see the puppet-show afterwards, eh?"




44      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


But the children were waiting at home: she
would not spend the evening in the city; she only
thought she would just kneel a moment in the
cathedral and say a little prayer or two for a
minute-the saints were so good in giving her so
many friends.
There is something very touching in the Flemish
peasant's relation with his Deity. It is all very vague
to him: a jumble of veneration and familiarity, of
sanctity and profanity, without any thought of
being familiar, or any idea of being profane.
There is a homely poetry, an innocent affectionateness in it, characteristic of the people. Ile talks
to his good angel Michel, and to his friend that
dear little Jesus, much as he would talk to the
shoemaker over the way or the cooper's child in
the doorway.
It is a very unreasonable, foolish, clumsy sort of
religion, this theology in wooden shoes; it is half
grotesque, half pathetic; the grandmothers pass it
on to the grandchildren as they pass the bowl of
potatoes round the stove in the long winter nights;
it is as silly as possible, but it comforts them as
they carry fagots over the frozen canals or wear
their eyes blind over the squares of lace; and it
has in it the supreme pathos of any perfect confidence, of any utterly childlike and undoubting
trust.
This had been taught to Bebee, and she went to
sleep every night in the firm belief that the sixteen
little angels of the Flemish prayer kept watch and




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


45


ward over her bed. For the rest, being poetical,
as these north folks are not, and having in herwherever it came from, poor little soul-a warmth
of fancy and a spirituality of vision not at all
northern, she had mixed up her religion with the
fairies of Antoine's stories, and the demons in
which the Flemish folks are profound believers,
and the flowers into which she put all manner of
sentient life, until her religion was a fantastic
medley, so entangled that poor Father Francis
had given up in despair any attempt to arrange it
more correctly. Indeed, being of the peasantry
himself, he was not so very full sure in his own
mind that demons were not bodily presences, quite
as real and often much more tangible than saints.
Anyway, he let her alone; and she believed in the
goodness of God as she believed in the shining of
the sun.
People looked after her as she went through the
twisting, picture-like streets, where sunlight fell
still between the peaked high roofs, and lamps
were here and there lit in the bric-a-brac shops
and the fruit-stalls.
Her little muslin cap blew back like the wings
of a white butterfly. Her sunny hair caught the
last sun-rays. Her feet were fair in the brown
wooden shoes.  Under the short woolen skirts
the grace of her pretty limbs moved freely. Her
broad silver clasps shone like a shield, and she was
utterly unconscious that any one looked; she was
simply and gravely intent on reaching St. Gudule




46      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


to say her one prayer and not keep the children
waiting.
Some one leaning idly over a balcony in the street
that is named after Mary of Burgundy saw her going
thus. IHe left the balcony and went down his stairs
and followed her.
The sun-dazzle on the silver had first caught his
sight; and then he had looked downward at the
pretty feet.
These are the chances women call Fate.
Bebee entered the cathedral. It was quite empty.
Far away at the west end there was an old custodian
asleep on a bench, and a woman kneeling. That
was all.
Bebee made her salutations to the high altar, and
stole on into the chapel of the Saint Sacrament; it
was that one that she loved best.
She said her prayer, and thanked the saints for
all their gifts and goodness, her clasped hand against
her silver shield, her basket on the pavement by
her, abovehead the sunset rays streaming purple
and crimson and golden through the painted windows that are the wonder of the world.
When her prayer was done she still kneeled
there; her head thrown back to watch the light,
her hands clasped still, and on her upturned face
the look that made the people say, "What does she
see?-the angels or the dead?"
She forgot everything. She forgot the cherries
at home, and the children even. She was looking
upward at the stories of the painted panes; she was




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


47


listening to the message of the dying sun-rays; she
was feeling vaguely, wistfully, unutterably the tender beauty of the sacred place and the awful wonder of the world in which she with her sixteen years
was all alone, like a little blue corn-flower among
the wheat that goes for grist and the barley that
makes men drunk.
For she was alone, though she had so many
friends. Quite alone sometimes; for God had been
cruel to her, and had made her a lark without song.
When tle sun faded and the beautiful casements
lost all glow and neaning, Bebee rose with a startled
look-had she been dreaming?-was it night?would the children be sorry, and go supperless to
bed?
" Iave you a rosebud left to sell to me?" a man's
voice said not far off; it was low and sweet, as became the Sacrament Chapel.
Bebee looked up; she did not quite know what
she saw: only dark eyes smiling into hers.
By the instinct of habit she sought in her basket
and found three moss-roses. She held them out
to him.
"I do not sell flowers here, but I will give them
to you," she said, in her pretty grave childish
fashion.
"I often want flowers," said the stranger, as he
took the buds. "Where do you sell yours?-in
the market '"
"In the Grande Place."
"Will you tell me your name, pretty one?"




48      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


"I am Bebee."
There were people coming into the church. The
bells were booming abovehead for vespers. There
was a shuffle of chairs and a stir of feet. ]Boys il
white went to and fro, lighting the candles. Great
clouds of shadow drifted up into the roof and hid
the angels.
She nodded her little head to him.
"Good-night; I cannot stay. I have a cake at
home to-night, and the children are waiting."
" Ah! that is important, no doubt, indeed. Will
you buy some more cakes for the children from
me?"
He slid a gold piece in her hand. She looked at
it in amaze. In the green lanes by Laeken no one
ever saw gold. Then she gave it him back.
" I will not take money in church, nor anywhere,
except what the flowers are worth. Good-night."
He followed her, and held back the heavy oak
door for her, and went out into the air with her.
It was dark already, but in the square there was
still the cool bright primrose-colored evening light.
ebebe's wooden shoes went pattering down the
sloping and uneven stones. ITer little gray figure
ran quickly through the deep shade cast from the
towers and walls. Her dreams had drifted away.
She was thinking of the children and the cake.
" You are in such a hurry because of the cake?"
said her new customer, as he followed her.
Bebe looked back at him with a smile in her
blue eyes.




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


49


"Yes-they will be waiting, you know, and there
are cherries too."
"It is a grand day with you, then?"
"It is my fete day: I am sixteen."
She was proud of this. She told it to the very
dogs in the street.
"Ah!-you feel old, I dare say?'
"Oh, quite old! They cannot call me a child
any more."
"Of course not; it would be ridiculous. Are
those presents in your basket?"
"Yes, every one of them."  She paused a moment to lift the dead vine-leaves, and show him the
beautiful shining red shoes. "Look!-old Gringoire gave me these. I shall wear them at mass
next Sunday. I never had a pair of shoes in my
life."
"But how will you wear shoes without stockings?"
It was a snake cast into her Eden.
She had never thought of it.
"Perhaps I can save money and buy some," she
answered, after a sad little pause. "But that I
could not do till next year. They would cost several francs, I suppose."
"Unless a good fairy gives them to you?"
Bebec smiled; fairies were real things to herrelatiols indeed. She did not imagine that he
spoke in jest.
" Sometimes I pray very much and things come,"
she said softly. " When the Gloire de Dijon was cut
6                D




50      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


back too soon one summer, and never blossomed,
and we all thought it was dead, I prayed all day
long for it, and never thought of anything else;
and by autumn it was all in new leaf, and now its
flowers are finer than ever."
" But you watered it whilst you prayed, I suppose?"
The sarcasm escaped her.
Slie was wondering to herself whether it would
be vain and wicked to pray for a pair of stockings:
she thought she would go and ask Father Francis.
By tlis time they were in the Rue Royale, and
half-way down it. The lanlps were lighted. A
regiment was marching up it with a band playing.
The windows were open, and people were laughing
and singiing in some of them. The light caught
tlle white and gilded fronts of the houses. The
pleasure-seeking crowds loitered along in the
warmth of tile evening.
Bebee, suddenly roused from her thoughts by the
loud challenge of the nilitary music, looked round
on the stranger, and motioned him back.
"Sir,-I do not know you,-wlly should you
come with me? Do not do it, please. You make
me talk, and that makes me late."
And she pushed her basket farther on her arm,
and nodded to him, and ran off-as fleetly as a hare
through fern-among the press of the people.
" To-morrow, little one," lie answered her with
a careless smile, and let her go unpursued. Above,
from the open casement of a cafe, some young men




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.        51
and some painted women leaned out, and threw
sweetmeats at him, as in carnival-time.
"A new model,-that pretty peasant?" they
asked him.
IIe laughed in answer, and went up the steps to
join them; he dropped the moss-roses as he went,
and trod on them, and did not wait.




CHAPTER IV.
EBEE ran home as fast as her feet would
take her.
The children were all gathered about
her gate in the dusky dewy evening; they met her
with shouts of welcome and reproach intermingled; they had been watching for her since first
the sun had grown low and red, and now the moon
was risen.
But they forgave her when they saw the splendor of her presents, and she showered out among
them Pere Melchior's horn of corrfits.
They dashed into the hut; they dragged the one
little table out among the flowers; the cherries
and cake were spread on it; and the miller's wife
had given a big jug of milk, and Father Francis
himself had sent some honeycomb.
The early roses were full of scent in the dew;
the great gillyflowers breathed out fragrance in
the dusk; the goat came and nibbled the sweetbrier unrebuked; the children repeated the Flemish bread-grace, with clasped hands and reverent
eyes-" Oh, dear little Jesus, come and sup with
us, and bring your beautiful Mother too; we will
62




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


53


not forget you are God." Then, that said, they ate,
and drank, and laughed, and picked cherries from
each other's mouths like little blackbirds; the big
white dog gnawed a crust at their feet; old Krebs,
who had a fiddle, and could play it, came out and
trilled them rude and ready Flemish tunes, such
as Teniers or Mieris might have jumped to before
an ale-house at the Kermesse; Bebee and the children joined hands, and danced round together in the
broad white moonlight, on the grass by the waterside; the idlers came and sat about, the women
netting or spinning, and the men smoking a pipe
before bed-time; the rough hearty Flemish bubbled like a brook in gossip, or rung like a horn
over a jest; Bebee and the children, tired of their
play, grew quiet, and chanted together the " Ave
Maria Stella Virginis;" a nightingale among the
willows sang to the sleeping swans.
All was happy, quiet, homely; lovely also in its
simple way.
They went early to their beds, as people must
do who rise at dawn.
Bebe leaned out a moment from her own little
casement ere she too went to rest.
Through an open lattice there sounded the murmur of some little child's prayer; the wind sighed
among the willows; the nightingales sang on in
the dark-all was still.
Iard work awaited her on the morrow, and on
all the other days of the year.
She was only a little peasant,-she must sweep,
5*




54      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


and spin, and dig, and delve, to get daily her bit
of black bread,-but that night she was as happy
as a little princess in a fairy tale; happy in her
playmates, in her flowers, in her sixteen years, in
her red shoes, in her silver buckles, because she
was half a woman; happy in the dewy leaves, in
the singing birds, in the hush of the night, in the
sense of rest, in the fragrance of flowers, in the
drifting changes of moon and cloud; happy because she was half a woman, because she was half
a poet, because she was wholly a poet.
" Oh, dear swans, how good it is to be sixteen!
-how good it is to live at all!-do you not tell
the willows so?" said Bebee to the gleam of silver
under the dark leaves by the water's side, which
showed her where her friends were sleeping, with
their snowy wings closed over their stately heads,
and the veiled gold and ruby of their eyes.
The swans did not awake to answer.
Only the nightingale answered from the willows,
with Desdemona's song.
But Bebee had never heard of Desdemona, and
the willows had no sigh for her.
" Good-night!" she said, softly, to all the green
dewy sleeping world, and then she lay down and
slept herself.-The nightingale sang on, and the
willows trembled.




CHAPTER V.
F I could save a centime a day, I could
buy a pair of stockings this time next
l year," thought Bebee, locking her shoes
with her other treasures in her drawer the next
morning, and taking her broom and pail to wash
down her little palace.
But a centime a day is a great deal in Brabant,
when one has not always enough for bare bread,
and when, in the long chill winter, one must weave
thread lace all through the short daylight for next
to nothing at all; for there are so many women in
Brabant, and every one of them, young or old, can
make lace, and if one do not like the pitiful wage,
one may leave it and go and die, for what the master lace-makers care or know; there will always
be enough, many more than enough, to twist the
thread round the bobbins, and weave the bridal
veils, and the trains for the courts.
"And besides, if I can save a centime, the Varnhart children ought to have it," thought Be6be, as
she swept the dust together. It was so selfish of
her to be dreaming about a pair of stockings, when
those little things often went for days on a stew of
nettles.
55




56      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


So she looked at her own pretty feet,-pretty,
and slender, and arched, rosy, and fair, and uncramped by the pressure of leather,-and resigned
her day-dream with a brave heart, as she put up
her broom and went out to weed, and hoe, and
trim, and prune the garden that had been for once
neglected the night before.
"One could not move half so easily in stockings,"
she thought with true philosophy as she worked
among the black fresh sweet-smelling mould, and
kissed a rose now and then as she passed one.
When she got into the city that day, her rushbottomed chair, which was always left upside down
in case rain should fall in the night, was set ready
for her, and on its seat was a gay, gilded box, such
as rich people give away full of bonbons.
Bebee stood and looked from the box to the
Broodhuis, from the Broodhuis to the box; she
glanced around, but no one had come there so
early as sle, except the tinker, who was busy
quarreling with his wife and letting his smelting
fire burn a hole in his breeches.
" The box was certainly for her, since it was set
upon her chair?"-Bbe6e pondered a moment;
then little by little opened the lid.
Within, on a nest of rose-satin, were two pair
of silk stockings!-Real silk!-with the prettiest
clocks worked up their sides in color!
Bebee gave a little scream, and stood still, the
blood hot in her cheeks; no one heard her, the
tinker's wife, who alone was near, having just




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


57


wished Ieaven to send a judgment on her husband,
was busy putting out his snioking small-clothes.
It is a way that womenand wives have, and they
never see the bathos of it.
The Place filled gradually.
The customary crowds gathered. The business
of the day began underneath the multitudinous
tones of the chiming bells.  Bebee's business
began too; she put the box behind her with a
beating heart, and tied up her flowers.
It was the fairies, of course!-but they had never
set a rush-bottomed chair on its legs before, and
this action of theirs frightened her.
It was rather an empty morning.  She sold
little, and there was the more time to think.
About an hour after noon, a voice addressed
her," IIave you more moss-roses for me?"
Bebee looked up with a smile, and found some.
It was her companion of the cathedral. She had
thought much of the red shoes and the silver
clasps, but she had thought nothing at all of
him.
" You are not too proud to be paid to-day?" he
said, giving her a silver franc-he would not alarm
her with any more gold; she thanked him, and
slipped it in her little leathern pouch, and went on
sorting some clove-pinks.
"You do not seem to remember me?" he said,
with a little sadness.
"Oh, I remember you," said Bebee, lifting her




58      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


frank eyes. "But you know I speak to so many
people, and they are all nothing to me."
" Who is anything to you?" It was softly and
insidiously spoken, but it awoke no echo.
"Varnhart's children," she answered him, instantly. " And old Annemie by the wharfside-and
Tambour-and Antoine's grave-and the starling
-and, of course, above all, the flowers."
"And the fairies, I suppose?-though they do
nothing for you."
She looked at him eagerly,"They have done something to-day. I have
found a box, and some stockings-such beautiful
stockings! Silk ones! Is it not very odd?"
" It is more odd they should have forgotten you
so long. May I see them?"
"I cannot show them to you now. Those ladies
are going to buy. But you can see them later-if
you wait."
" I will wait and paint the Broodhuis."
"So many people do that; you are a painter
then?"
" Yes-in a way."
lie sat down on an edge of the stall, and spread
his things there, and sketched, whilst the traffic
went on around them. He was very many years
older than she; handsome, with a dark, and
changeful, and listless face; he wore brown velvet,
and had a red ribbon at his throat; he looked a
little as Egmont might have done when wooing
Claire.




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


59


Bebee, as she sold the flowers and took the
change fifty times in the hour, glanced at him
now and then, and watched the movements of his
hands-she could not have told why.
Always among men and women, always in the
crowds of the streets, people were nothing to her;
she went through them as through a field of standing corn,-only in the field she would have tarried
for poppies, and in the town she tarried for no one.
She dealt with meni as with women, simply,
truthfully, frankly, with the innocent fearlessness
of a child. When they told her slie was pretty,
she smiled; it was just as they said that her flowers
were sweet.
But this man's hands moved so swiftly; and as
she saw her Broodhuis growing into color and
form beneath them she could not choose but look
now and then, and twice she gave her change
wrong.
IIe spoke to her rarely, and sketched on and
on in rapid bold strokes the quaint graces and
massive richness of the Maison du Roi.
There is no crowd so busy in Brabant that it
will not find leisure to stare. Tile Fleming or the
Walloon has nothing of the Frenchman's courtesy;
he is rough and rude; he remains a peasant even
when town-bred, and the surly insolence of the
" Gueux" is in him still. IIe is kindly to his fellows, though not to beasts; he is shrewd, patient,
thrifty, industrious, and good in very many ways,
but civil never.




60      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHIOES.


A good score of them left off their occupations
and clustered round the painter, staring, chattering,
pushing, pointing, as though a brush had never
been seen in all the land of Rubens.
Bebee, ashamed of her people, got up from her
chair and rebuked them.
" Oh, men of Brussels; fie then for shame!" she
called to them as clearly as a robin sings. "Did
never you see a drawing before? and are there not
saints and martyrs enough to look at in the galleries?-and have you never some better thing to do
than to gape wide-mouthed at a stranger? What
laziness-ah! just worthy of a people who sleep
and smoke while their dogs work for them! Go
away, all of you; look, there comes the gendarme
-it will be the worse for you. Sir, sit under my
stall; they will not dare trouble you then."
He moved under the awning, thanking her with
a smile; and the people, laughing, shuffled unwillingly aside and let him paint on in peace. It was
only little Bebee, but they had spoilt the child from
her infancy, and were used to obey her.
The painter took a long time. I-e set about it
with the bold ease of one used to all the intricacies
of form and color, and he had the skill of a master.
But he spent more than half the time looking idly
at the humors of the populace or watching how
the treasures of Bebe'e's garden went away one by
one in the hands of strangers.
Meanwhile, ever and again, sitting on the edge
of her stall, with his colors and brushes tossed out




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


61


on the board, he talked to her, and, with the soft
imperceptible skill of long practice in those arts,
he drew out the details of her little simple life.
There were not always people to buy, and whilst
she rested and sheltered the flowers from the sun
slie answered him willingly, and in one of her
longer rests showed him the wonderful stockings.
"Do you think it could be the fairies?" she asked
him a little doubtfully.
It was easy to make her believe any fantastical
nonsense; but her fairies were ethereal divinities.
She could scarcely believe that they had laid that
box on her chair.
"Impossible to doubt it!" he replied, unhesitatingly.  "Given a belief in fairies at all, why
should there be any limit to what they can do?
It is the same with the saints, is it not?"
"Yes," said Bebee, thoughtfully.
The saints were mixed up in her imagination
with the fairies in an intricacy that would have
defied the best reasonings of Father Francis.
"Well, then, you will wear the stockings, will
you not? Only, believe me, your feet are far prettier
without them."
Bebee laughed happily, and took another peep
in the cosy rose-satin nest. But her little face
had a certain perplexity. Suddenly she turned on
him.
"Did not you put them there?"
"I?-never!"
"Are you quite sure?"
6




62      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES


Quite; but why ask?"
"Because," said Bebee, shutting the box reso.
lutely and pushing it a little away, "because I
would not take it if you did. You are a stranger,
and a present is a debt, so Antoine always said."
"Why take a present then from the Varnhart
children, or your old friend who gave you the
clasps?"
"Ah, that is very different. When people are
very, very poor, equally poor, the one with the
other, little presents that they save for and make
with such a difficulty are just things that are a
pleasure; sacrifices; like your sitting up with a
sick person at night, and then sle sits up with you
another year when you want it. Do you not
know?"
"I know you talk very prettily.  But why
should you not take any one else's present, though
he may not be poor?"
"Because I could not return it."
"Could you not?"
The smile in his eyes dazzled her a little; it was
so strange, and yet had so much light in it; but
she did not understand him one whit.
"No; how could I?" she said, earnestly. "If
I were to save for two years, I could not get francs
enough to buy anything worth giving back; and
I should be so unhappy, thinking of the debt of it
always. Do tell me if you put those stockings
there?"
"No;" he looked at her, and the trivial lie




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


63


faltered and died away; the eyes, clear as crystal,
questioned him so innocently.
" Well, if I did?" he said, frankly, "you wished
for them; what harm was there? Will you be so
cruel as to refuse them from me?"
The tears sprang into Bebee's eyes. She was
sorry to lose the beautiful box, but more sorry he
had lied to her.
" It was very kind and good," she said, regretfully. " But I cannot think why you should have
done it, as you had never known me at all. And,
indeed, I could not take them, because Antoine
would not let me if he were alive; and if I gave
you a flower every day all the year round I should
not pay you the worth of them-it would be quite
impossible; and why should you tell me falsehoods
about such a thing? A falsehood is never a thing
for a man."
She shut the box and pushed it towards him,
and turned to the selling of her bouquets. Her
voice shook a little as she tied up a bunch of
mignonette and told the price of it.
Those beautiful stockings! why had she ever
seen them, and why had he told her a lie?
It made her heart heavy. For the first time in
her brief life the Broodhuis seemed to frown between her and the sun.
Undisturbed, he painted on and did not look at
her.
The day was nearly done. The people began to
scatter. The shadows grew very long. He painted,




64      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


not glancing once elsewhere than at his study.
Bebee's baskets were quite empty.
She rose, and lingered, and regarded him wistfully: he was angered; perhaps she had been
rude? Her little heart failed her.
If he would only look up!But he did not look up; he kept his handsome
dark face studiously over the canvas of the Broodhuis. She would have seen a smile in his eyes if
he had lifted them; but he never raised his lids.
Bebee hesitated: take the stockings she would
not; but perhaps she had refused them too roughly.
She wished so that he would look up and save ler
speaking first; but he knew what he was about
too warily and well to help her thus.
She waited awhile, then took one little red mossrosebud that she had saved all day in a corner of
her basket, and held it out to him frankly, slhyly,
as a peace-offering.
"Was I rude? I did not mean to be. But I
cannot take the stockings; and why did you tell
me that falsehood?"
lie took the rosebud and rose too, and smiled;
but he did not meet her eyes.
"Let us forget the whole matter; it is not worth
a sou. If you do not take the box, leave it; it is
of no use to me."
" I cannot take it."
She knew she was doing right. HIow was it that
he could make her feel as though she were acting
wrongly?




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


65


"Leave it then, I say. You are not the first
woman, my dear, who has quarreled with a wish
fulfilled. It is a way your sex has of rewarding
gods and men. Here, you old witch-here is a
treasure-trove for you. You can sell it for ten
francs in the town anywhere."
As he spoke he tossed the casket and the stockings in it to an old decrepit woman, who was passing by with a baker's cart drawn by a dog; and,
not staying to heed her astonishment, gathered his
colors and easel together.
The tears swam in Bebee's eyes as she saw the
box whirled through the air.
She had done right-she was sure she had done
right.
IIe was a stranger, and she could never have
repaid him; but he made her feel herself wayward
and ungrateful, and it was hard to see the beautiful fairy gift borne away forever by the chuckling,
hobbling, greedy old baker's woman. If he had
only taken it himself, she would have been glad
then to have been brave and to have done her
duty.
But it was not in his design that she should be
glad.
tIe saw her tears, but he seemed not to see them.
"Good-night, Btbee," he said carelessly, as lie
sauntered aside from her. "( Good-night, my dear.
To-morrow I will finish my painting; but I will
not offend you by any more gifts."
Bebee lifted her drooped head, and looked him


6*:E




66      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


in the eyes eagerly, with a certain sturdy resolve
and timid wistfulness intermingled in her look.
"Sir,-see, you speak to me quite wrongly,"
she said with a quick accent, that had pride as
well as pain in it. "Say it was kind to bring me
what I wished for-yes, it was kind, I know; but
you never saw me till last night, and I cannot tell
even your name; and it is very wrong to lie to any
one, even to a little thing like me; and I am only
Bebee, and cannot give you anything back,. because
I have only just enough to feed myself and the starling, and not always that in winter. I thank you
very much for what you wished to do; but if I had
taken those things, I think you would have thought
me very mean and full of greed; and Antoine
always said,' Do not take what you cannot paynot ever what you cannot pay-that is the way to
walk with pure feet.' Perhaps I spoke ill, because they spoil me, and they say I am too swift
to say my mind. But I am not thankless-not
thankless, indeed-it is only I could not take what
I cannot pay. That is all. You are angry stillnot now-no?"
There was anxiety in the pleading. What did
it matter to her what a stranger thought?
And yet Be6be's heart was heavy as he laughed
a little coldly, and bade her good-day, and left her
alone to go out of the city homewards. A sense
of having done wrong weighed on her; of having
been rude and ungrateful.
She had no heart for the children that evening.




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


67


Mere Krebs was sitting out before her door shelling
peas, and called to her to come in and have a drop
of coffee. Krebs had come in from Vilv6orde fair,
and brought a stock of rare good berries with him.
But Bebe'e thanked her, and went on to her own
garden to work.
She had always liked to sit out on the quaint
wooden steps of the mill and under the red shadow
of the sails, watching the swallows flutter to and
fro in the sunset, and hearing the droll frogs croak
in the rushes, while the old people told her tales
of the time of how in their babyhood they had run
out, fearful yet fascinated, to see the beautiful
Scots Grays flash by in the murky night, and the
endless line of guns and caissons crawl black as a
snake through the summer dust and the trampled
corn, going out past the woods to Waterloo.
But to-night she had no fancy for it: she wanted
to be alone with the flowers.
Though, to be sure, they had been very heartless
when Antoine's coffin had gone past them, still
they had sympathy; the daisies smiled at her with
their golden eyes, and the roses dropped tears on
her hand, just as her mood might be; the flowers
were closer friends, after all, than any human souls;
and besides, she could say so much to them!
Flowers belong to fairy-land; the flowers and the
birds, and the butterflies, are all that the world
has kept of its Golden Age; the only perfectly
beautiful things on earth, joyous, innocent, halfdivine, useless, say they who are wiser than God.




68      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


Bebee went home and worked among her flowers.
A little laborious figure, with her petticoats
twisted high, and her feet wet with the night dews,
and her back bowed to the hoeing and clipping
and raking among the blossoming plants.
"How late you are working to-night, Bebee!"
one or two called out, as they passed the gate.
She looked up and smiled; but went on working
while the white moon rose.
She did not know what ailed her.
She went to bed without supper, leaving her bit
of bread and bowl of goat's milk to make a meal
for the fowls in the morning.
"Little ugly, shameful, naked feet!" she said
to them, sitting on the edge of her mattress, and
looking at them in the moonlight.  They were
very pretty feet, and would not have been half so
pretty in silk hose and satin shoon; but she did
not know that: he had told her she wanted those
vanities.
She sat still a long while, her rosy feet swaying
to and fro like two roses that grow on one stalk
and hang down in the wind. The little lattice
was open; the sweet and dusky garden was beyond; there was a hand's breadth of sky, in which
a single star was shining; the leaves of the vine
hid all the rest.
But for once she saw none of it.
She only saw the black Broodhuis; the red and
gold sunset overhead; the gray stones, with the
fallen rose-leaves and crushed fruits; and in the




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.        69
shadows two dark, reproachful eyes, that looked
at hers.
Iad she been ungrateful?
The little tender, honest heart of her was
troubled and oppressed. For once, that night she
slept ill.




CHAPTER VI.
LL the next day she sat under the yellow
awning, but she sat alone.
It was market-day; there were many
strangers. Flowers were in demand. The copper
pieces were ringing against one another all the
hours through in her leathern bag. The cobbler
was in such good humor that he forgot to quarrel
with his wife. The fruit was in such plenty that
they gave her a leaf-full of white and red currants
for her noonday dinner. And the people split
their sides at the Cheap John's jokes; he was so
droll. No one saw the leaks in his kettles or the
hole in his bellows, or the leg that was lacking to
his milking-stool.
Everybody was gay and merry that day. But
Bebee's blue eyes looked wistfully over the throng,
and did not find what they sought.  Somehow
the day seemed dull, and the square empty.
The stones and the timbers around seemed more
than ever full of a thousand stories that they would
not tell her because she knew nothing, and was,only Be6be.
She had never known a dull hour before. She,
70




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


71


a little bright, industrious, gay thing, whose hands
were always full of work, and whose head was
always full of fancies, even in the grimmest wintertime, when she wove the lace in the gray, chilly
work-room, with the frost on the casements, and
the mice running out in their hunger over the bare
brick floor.
That bare room was a sad enough place sometimes, when the old women would bewail how
they starved on the pittance they gained, and the
young women sighed for their aching heads and
their failing eyesight, and the children dropped
great tears on the bobbins, because they had come
out without a crust to break their fast.
She had been sad there often for others, but she
had never been dull-not with this unfamiliar,
desolate, dreary dullness, that seemed to take all
the mirth out of the busy life around her, and all
the color out of the blue sky above. Why, she had
no idea herself. She wondered if she were going
to be ill; she had never been ill in her life, being
strong as a little bird that has never known cage
or captivity.
When the day was done, Bebee gave a quick
sigh as she looked across the square. She had so
wanted to tell him that she was not ungrateful; and
she had a little moss-rose ready, with a sprig of
sweet-brier, and a tiny spray of maiden-hair fern
that grew under the willows, which she had kept
covered up with a leaf of sycamore all the day
long.




72      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


No one would have it now.
The child went out of the place sadly, as the
carillon rang.  There was only the moss-rose in
her basket, and the red and white currants that
had been given her for her dinner.
She went along the twisting, many-colored,
quaintly-fashioned streets, till she came to the
water-side.
It is very ancient there still; there are all manner of old buildings, black and brown and gray,
peaked roofs, gabled windows, arched doors, crumbling bridges, twisted galleries leaning to touch the
dark surface of the canal, dusky wharves crowded
with barrels, and bales, and cattle, and timber, and
all the various freightage that the good ships come
and go with all the year round, to and from the
Zuyder-Zee, and the Baltic water, and the wild
Northumbrian shores, and the iron-bound Scottish
headlands, and the pretty gray Norman seaports,
and the white sandy dunes of Holland, with the
toy towns and the straight poplar-trees.
Bebee was fond of watching the brigs and barges,
that looked so big to her, with their national flags
flying, and their tall masts standing thick as grass,
and their tawny sails flapping in the wind, and
about them the sweet, strong smell of that strange,
unknown thing, the sea.
Sometimes the sailors would talk with her; sometimes some old salt, sitting astride of a cask, would
tell her a mariner's tale of far-away lands and mysteries of the deep; sometimes some curly-headed




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


73


cabin-boy would give her a shell or a plume of
sea-weed, and try and make her understand what
tlhe wonderful wild water was like, which was not
quiet and sluggish and dusky as this canal was,
but was forever changing and moving, ald curling
and leaping, and making itself now blue as her
eyes, now black as tllat thunder-cloud, now white
as the snow that the winter wind tossed, now pearlhued and opaline as the convolvulus that blew in
her own garden.
And Bebee would listen, with the shell in her
lap, and try to understand, and gaze at the ships
and then at the sky beyond them, and try to figure
to herself those strange countries to which these
slips were always going, and saw in fancy all the
blossoming orchard province of green France, and
all the fir-clothed hills and rushing rivers of the
snow-locked Swedish shore, and saw too, doubtless,
many lands that had no place at all except in
dream-land, and were more beautiful even than the
beauty of the earth, as poets' countries are, to their
own sorrow oftentimes.
But this dull day B3ebee did not go down upon
the wharf; she did not want the sailors' tales; she
saw the masts and the bits of bunting that streamed
from them, and they made her restless, which they
had never done before.
Instead she went in at a dark old door and
climbed up a steep staircase that went up and up,
as though she were mounting St. Gudule's belfry
towers; and at the top of it entered a little chamber
7




74      TVO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


in the roof, where one square unglazed hole that
served for lig}lt looked out upon the canal, with all
its crowded craft, fioni the dainty schooner-yacht,
fresh as gilding and holy-stone could make her,
that was running for pleasure to the Scheldt, to the
rude, clumsy coal-barge, black as night, that bore
the rough diamonds of Belgium to the snow-buried
roofs of Christiania and Stronlstad.
In the little dark attic there was a very old
woman in a red petticoat and a high cap, who sat
against the windo, allnd pricked out lace patterns
with a pin, on thick paper. She was eighty-five
years old, and could hardly keep body and soul
togetller.
Bebee, running to her, kissed her.
"Oh, mother Ann6niie, look here! Beautiful
red and white currants, alld a roll; I saved them
for you. They are the first currants we have seen
this year. Me? oh, fbr me, I have eaten more than
are good! You know I pick fruit like a sparrow,
always. Dear mother Alnnemie, are you better?
Are you quite sure you are better to-day?"
The little old withered woman, brown as a walnut and meagre as a rush, took the currants, and
smiled with a childish glee, and began to eat them,
blessing the child with each crumb she broke off
the bread.
" Why had you not a grandmother of your own,
my little onee?" she munmbled. "How good you
would have been to her, Bebee!"
"Yes," said tBeb6e seriously, but her mind could




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


75


not grasp the idea. It was easier for her to believe
the fanciful lily-parentage of Antoine's stories.
" IIow much work have you done, Annemie? Oh,
all that? all that? But there is enough for a week.
You work too early and too late, you dear Annemie."
" Nay, Bebee, when one has to get one's bread
that cannot be. But I am afraid my eyes are failing. That rose now, is it well done?"
" Beautifully done. Would the Baes take them
if they were not? You know he is one that cuts
every centime in four pieces."
"Ah! sharp enough, slar'p enough-that is true.
But I am always afraid of my eyes. I do not see
the flags out there so well as I used to do."
"Because the sun is so bright, Annlmie; that is
all. I myself, when I have been sitting all day in
the Place in the light, the flowers look pale to me.
And you know it is not age with me, Annemie?"
The old woman and the young girl laughed together at that droll idea.
" You have a merry heart, dear little one,"
said old Annelmie. "The saints keep it to you
always."
"May I tidy the room a little?"
"To be sure, dear, and thank you too. I have
not much time, you see; and somehow my back
aches badly whenl I stoop."
" And it is so damp here for you, over all that
water!" said Beb6e as she swept and dusted and
set to rights the tiny place, and put in a little




76      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES


broken pot a few sprays of honeysuckle and rosemary that she had brought with her. "It is so
damp here. You should have come and lived in
my hut with me, Annemie, and sat out under the
vine all day, and looked after the chickens for me
when I was in the town. They are such mischievous little souls; as soon as my back is turned
one or other is sure to push through the roof, and
get out among the flowerbeds. Will you never
change your mind, and live with me, Annemie?
I am sure you would be happy, and the starling
says your name quite plain, and he is such a funny
bird to talk to; you never would tire of him. Will
you never come? It is so bright there, and green
and sweet-snmelling; and to think you never even
have seen it!-and the swans and all,-it is a
shame."
"No, dear," said old Annemie, eating her last
bunch of currants. "You have said so so often,
and you are good and mean it, that I know. But
I could not leave the water. It would kill ne.
Out of this window you know I saw my Jeannot's
brig go away-away-away-till the masts were
lost in the mists. Going with iron to Norway; the
Fleur d'Epine of this town, a good ship, and a sure,
and her mate; and as proud as might be, and with
a little blest Mary in lead round his throat. She
was to be back in port in eight months, bril'inog
timber. Eight months-that brought Easter-time.
But she never came. Never, never, never, you
know. I sat here watching them come and go,




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


77


and my child sickened and died, and the summer
passed, and the autumn, and all the while I looked
-looked-looked; for the brigs are all much alike;
and only her I always saw as soon as she hove in
sight (because he tied a hank of flax to her mizzen
mast); and when he was home safe and sound I
spun the hank into hose for him; that was a fancy
of his, and for eleven voyages, one on another, he
had never missed to tie the flax nor I to spin the
hose. But the hank of flax I never saw this time;
nor the brave brig; nor my good man with his
sulnny blue eyes. Only one day ill winter, when
the great blocks of ice were snashinlg hither and
thither, a coaster came in and brought tidings of
how off in tlhe Danish waters they had come on a
waterlogged brig, and had boarded her, and had
found her empty, and her hull riven in two, and
her crew all drowned and dead beyond any manner
of doubt. And oil her stern there was her name
painted white, the Fleur d'Epine, of Brussels, as
plain as name could be; aiid that was all we ever
knew: what evil had struck her, or how they
had perished, nobody ever told. Only the coaster
brought that bit of beam away, with the Fleur
d'Epine writ clear upon it. But you see I never knowo
my manll is dead. Any day-who can say?-any
one of those ships may bring him aboard of her,
and he may leap out on the wharf there, and come
running up the stairs as lie used to do, and cry, in
his merry voice,' Annemie, Annmnie, here is more
flax to spin, here is more hose to weave!' For
7*




78      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOPS.


that was always his homeward word; no matter
whether he had had fair weather or foul, he always
knotted the flax to his masthead. So you see,
dear, I could not leave here. For what if he came
and found me away? He would say it was an odd
fashion of mourning for him. And I could not do
without the window, you know. I can watch all
the brigs come in; and I can smell the shipping
smell that I have loved all the days of my life; and
I can see the lads heaving, and climbing, and furling, and mending their bits of canvas, and hauling
their flags up and down. And then who can say?
-the sea never took him, I think-I think I shall
hear his voice before I die. For they do say that
God is good."
Bebee, sweeping very noiselessly, listened, and
her eyes grew wistful and wondering. She had
heard the story a thousand times; always in different words, but always the same little tale, and she
knew how old Anne6mie was deaf to all the bells
that tolled the time, and blind to all the whiteness
of her hair and all the wrinkles of her face, and
only thought of her sea-slain lover as he had been
in the days of her youth.
But this afternoon the familiar history had a
new patheticalness for her, and as the old soul put
aside with her palsied hand the square of canvas that
screened the casement, and looked out, with her
old dim sad eyes strained in the longing that God
never answered, Bebee felt a strange chill at her
own heart, and wondered to herself,



TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


79


"What can it be to care for another creature
like that? It must be so terrible, and yet it must
be beautiful too. Does every one suffer like that?"
She did not speak at all as she finished sweeping the bricks, and went down-stairs for a metal
cruche full of water, and set over a little charcoal
on the stove the old woman's brass soup-kettle
with her supper of stewing cabbage.
Annemie did not hear or notice; she was still
looking out of the hole in the wall on to the masts,
and the sails, and the water.
It was twilight.
From the barges and brigs there came the smell
of the sea. The sailors were shouting to each
other. The craft were crowded close, and lost in
the growing darkness. On the other side of the
canal the belfries were ringing for vespers.
"Eleven voyages one and another, and he never
forgot to tie the flax to the mast," Ann6mie murmured, with her old wrinkled face leaning out into
the gray air. "It used to fly there,-one could see
it coming up half a mile oft —just a pale-yellow
flake on the wind, like a tress of my hair, he would
say. No, no, I could not go away; he may come
to-night, to-morrow, any time; he is not drowned,
not my man; he was all I had, and God is good,
they say."
Bebee listened and looked; then kissed the old
shaking hand and took up the lace patterns and
went softly out of the room without speaking.
When old Annemie watched at the window it




80      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


was useless to seek for any word or sign of her;
people said that she had never been quite right in
her brain since that fatal winter noon sixty years
before, when the coaster had brought into port the
broken beam of the good brig Fleur d'Epine.
Bebee did not know about that, nor heed whether
her wits were right or nlot.
She had known the old creature in the lace-room
where Annemie pricked out designs, and she had
conceived a great regard and sorrow for her; and
when Annemie had become too ailing and aged to
go herself any longer to the lace-maker's place,
Bebee had begged leave for her to have the patterns at home, and had carried them to and fro for
her for the last three or four years, doing many
other little useful services for the lone old soul as
well-services which Annemie hardly perceived,
she had grown so used to them, and her feeble
intelligence was so sunk in the one absorbing idea
that she must watch all the days through and all
the years through for the coming of the dead man
and the lost brig.
Bebee put the lace patterns in her basket, and
trotted home, her sabots clattering on the stones.
"What is must be to care for any one like
that!" she thought, and by some vague association of thought that she could not have pursued,
she lifted the leaves and looked at the moss-rosebud.
It was quite dead.




CHAPTER       VII.
S she got clear of the city and out on her
country road, a shadow fell across her in
the evening light.
"IIave you had a good day, little one?" asked
a voice that made her stop with a curious vague
expectancy and pleasure.
"It is you!" she said, with a little cry, as she
saw her friend of the silk stockings leaning on a
gate midway in the green and solitary road that
leads to Laeken.
"Yes, it is I," he answered, as he joined her.
"  ave you forgiven me, Be6be?"
She looked at him with frank, appealing eyes,
like those of a child in fault.
" Oh, I did not sleep all night," she said, simply.
"I thought I had been rude and ungrateful, and I
could not be sure I had done right, though to have
done otherwise would certainly have been wrong."
lie laughed.
" Well, that is a clearer deduction than is to be
drawn from most moral uncertainties.  Do not
think twice about the matter, my dear. I have
not, I assure you."


F


81




82      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SIOES.


"No!"
She was a little disappointed. It seemed such
an immense thing to her; and she had lain awake
all the night, turning it about in her little brain,
and appealing vainly for help in it to the sixteen
sleep-angels.
" No, indeed. And where are you going so fast,
as if those wooden shoes of yours were sandals of
Mercury?"
"Mercury-is that a shoemaker?"
" No, my dear. IIe did a terrible bit of cobbling
once, when he made Wonman. But he did not
shoe lter feet with swiftness that I know of; she
only runs away to be run after, and if you do not
pursue her, she comes back-always."
Bebee did not understand at all.
" I thought God made women," she said, a little
awe-stricken.
" You call it God. People three thousand years
ago called it Mercury or Hermes.  Both mean
the same thing,-mere words to designate an
unknown quality. Where are you going? Does
your home lie here?"
"Yes, onward, quite far onward," said Bebee,
wondering that he had forgotten all she had told
him the day before about her hut, her garden, and
her neighbors. "You did not come and finish your
picture to-day: why was that? I had a rosebud for
you, but it is dead now."
"I went to Anvers. You looked for me a little,
then?"




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


83


" Oh, all day long. For I was so afraid I had
been ungrateful."
" That is very pretty of you. Women are never
grateful, my dear, except when they are very illtreated. Mercury, whom we were talking of, gave
them, among other gifts, a dog's heart."
Be3bee felt bewildered; she (lid not reason about
it, but the idle, shallow, cynical tone, pained her
by its levity and its unlikeness to the sweet, still,
gray summer evening.
" Why are you in such a hurry?" he pursued.
"The night is cool, and it is only seven o'clock.
I will walk part of the way with you."
"I am in a hurry because I have Annemie's
patterns to do," said Bebee, glad that he spoke of
a thiing that she knew how to answer. "You see,
Anlnenie's hand shakes and her eyes are dim, and
she pricks the pattern all awry and never perceives
it; it would break her heart if one showed her so,
but the Baes would not take them as they are;
they are of no use at all. So I prick them out
myself on fresh paper, and the Baes thinks it is all
her doing, and pays her the same money, and she
is quite content. And as I carry the patterns to
and fro for her, because she cannot walk, it is easy
to cheat her like that; and it is no harm to cheat
so, you know." IIe was silent.
"You are a good little girl, Bebee, I can see,"
he said at last, with a graver sound in his voice.
"And who is this Annemie for whom you do so
much-an old woman, I suppose?"




84      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


"Oh, yes, quite old; incredibly old. Her man
was drowned at sea sixty years ago, and she
watches for his brig still, night and morning."
" The dog's heart. No doubt he beat her, and
had a wife in fifty other ports."
"Oh, no," said Bebee, with a little cry, as
though the word against the dead man hurt her.
"She has told me so much of him. Ie was as good
as good could be, and loved her so, and between
the voyages they were so happy. Surely that must
have been sixty years now, and she is so sorry
still, and still will not believe that he was drowned."
He looked down on her with a smile that had a
certain pity in it.
" Well, yes; there are women like that, I believe.
But be very sure, my dear, he beat her. Of the
two, one always holds the whip and uses it,-the
other crouches."
"I do not understand," said Bebee.
"No-but you will."
"I will?-when?"
Hie smiled again.
" Oh-to-morrow, perhaps, or next year-or
when Fate fancies."
" Or rather-when I choose," he thought to himself, and let his eyes rest with a certain pleasure
on the little feet, that went beside him in the grass,
and the pretty fair bosom that showed ever and
again, as the frills of her linen bodice were blown
tack by the wind and her own quick motion.
Bebee looked also up at him; he was very hand

4V




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHIOES.


85


some, and looked so-to her, after the broad blunt
characterless faces of the Walloon peasantry around
her. He walked with an easy grace, he was clad
in picture-like velvets, he had a beautiful poetic
head, and eyes like deep brown waters, and a face
like one of Jordaens' or Rembrandt's cavaliers in
the galleries where she used to steal in of a Sunday, and look up at the paintings, and dream of
what that world' could be in which those people
had lived.
" You are of the people of Rubes' country, are you
not?" she asked him.
"Of what country, my dear?"
" Of tlhe people that live in the gold frames,"
said Bebee, quite seriously. "In the galleries, you
know. I know a charwoman that scrubs the floors of
the Arenberg Palace, and she lets me in sometimes
to look; and you are just like those great gentlemen in the gold frames, only you have not a hawk
and a sword, and they always have. I used to
wonder where they came from, for they are not
like any of us one bit, and the charwoman-she is
Lisa Dredel, and lives in the street of the Pot
d'Etain-always said, 'Dear heart, they all belong
to Rubes' land-we never see their like nowadays.' But you must come out of Rubes' land; at
least, I think so, do you not?"
IIe caught her meaning; he knew that Rubes was
the homely abbreviation of Rubens that all the
Netherlanders used, and he guessed the idea that
was reality to this little lonely fanciful mind.
8




86      TIO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


" Perhaps I do," he answered her with a smile,
for it was not worth llis wlhile to disa),use her
thoughts of aly imagination that glorified him to
her. " Do you not want to see Rubes' world, little
one?  To see the gold and the grandeur, and the
glitter of it all?-never to toil or get tired?-always
to move in a pagealnt?-always to live like the
hawkvs in the paintings you talk of, with silver
bells hung rould you, and a hood all sevwn with
pearls?"
"No," said Beb6e, simply.  "I should like to
see it-just to see it, as one looks through a gratilng
into tlie king's grape-houses here.  But I should
not like to live in it. I love my hut, a(nd the starling, and the chickens, and what would the garden
do without nle?-and the children, and the old
Anne6ie? I could not anyhow, anywhlere, be ally
happier than I am.  There is only one thing I
wishl."
"And what is that?"
"To know somethilln; not to be so ignorant.
Just look-I can read a little, it is true: mly IIours,
and the letters, and when Irebs brings in a newspaper I can read a little of it-not much. I know
French well, because Antoine was French himself,
and never did talk Flemish to me; and they being
Netherlanders, cannot, of course, read tlhe newspapers at all, and so think it very wonderful indeed
il n e. But lwhat I want is to kiow tilings, to
know all about what was before ever I was livinl.
St. Gudule now-they say it was built hu ldreds of




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


87


years before; and Rubes again-they say he was a
painter-king in Antwerpen before the oldest oldest
woman like Annernie ever began to count time. I
anm sure books tell you all those things, because I see
the studenlts coming and going with them; all( when
I saw once the millions of books in the Rue (lu
Musee, I asked the keeper what use they were for,
and he said, 'To make men wise, my dear.' But
Gringoire Bac the cobbler, who was with me,-it
was a fete day,-Bac, he said, 'Do not you believe
that, Bebee; they only muddle folk's brains; for
one book tells them one thing, and another book
another, and so on, till they are dazed with all the
contrary lying; atnd if you see a bookish man, be
sure you see a very poor creature wlho could not
hoe a patch, or kill a pig, or stitch an upper-leather,
were it ever so.' But I do not believe that Bac
said right. Did he?"
"I am not sure. On the whole, I think it is the
truest remark on literature I have ever heard, and
one that shows great judgment in Bac. Well?"
"Well-sometimes, you know," said Be6bee,
not understanding his answer, but pursuing her
thoughts confidentially; " sometimes I talk like
this to the neighbors, and they laugh at me. Because Mere Krebs says that when one knows how
to spin and sweep and make bread and say one's
prayers and milk a goat or a cow, it is all a woman
wants to know this side of heaven. But for me, I
cannot help it-when I look at those windows in
the cathedral, or at those beautiful twisted little




88      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


spires that are all over our H-tel de Ville, I want
to know who the men were that made them —what
they did and thought-how they looked and
spoke,-how they learned to shape stone into
leaves and grasses like that-how they could imagine all those angel faces on the glass. When Igo
alone in the quite early morning or at night when
it is still-sometimes in winter I have to stay till
it is dark over the lace-I hear their feet come
after me, and they whisper to me close, 'Look
what beautiful things we have done, BeIbee, and
you all forget us quite. We did what never will
die, but our names are as dead as the stones.'
And then I am so sorry for them and ashamed.
And I want to know more. Can you tell me?"
He looked at her earnestly; her eyes were
shining, her cheeks were- warm, her little mouth
was tremulous with eagerness.
"Did any one ever speak to you in that way?"
he asked her.
"No," she answered him. "It comes into my
head of itself. Sometimes I think the cathedral
angels put it there. For the angels must be tired,
you know; always pointing to God and always
seeing men turn away. I used to tell Antoine
sometimes. But he used to shake his head and
say that it was no use thinking; most likely St.
Gudule and St. Michael had set the church down
in the night all ready-made, why not? God made
the trees, and they were more wonderful, he
thought, for his part. And so perhaps they are.




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


89


but that is no answer. And I do want to know.
I want some one who will tell me,-and if you
come out of Rubes' country as I think, no doubt
you know every thing, or remember it?"
IIe smiled.
" The free pass to Rubes' country lies in books,
pretty one. Shall I give you some?-nay, lend
them, I mean, since giving you are too willful to
hear of without oflense.  You can read, you
said?"
Bebee's eyes glowed as they lifted themselves
to his.
"I can read-not very fast, but that would
come with doing it more and more, I think, just
as spinning does-one knots the thread and breaks
it a million times before one learns to spin as fine
as cobwebs. I have read the stories of St. Anne,
and of St. Catherine, and of St. Luven fifty times,
but they are all the books that Father Francis has;
and no one else has any among us."
"Very well.  You shall have books of mine.
Easy ones first; and then those that are more
serious. But what time will you have? You do
so much; you are like a little golden bee."
B.bee laughed happily.
"Oh! give me the books and I will find the
time. It is light so early now. That gives one
so many hours.  In winter one has so few one
must lie in bed, because to buy a candle you know
one cannot afford except of course, a taper now
and then, as one's duty is, for our Lady or for
8*




90      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


the dead. And will you really, really, lend me
books?"
" Really-I will. Yes. I will bring you one to
the Grande Place to-morrow, or meet you on your
road there with it. Do you know what poetry is,
Bebee?"
" No."
"But your flowers talk to you?"
"Ah! always. But then no one else hears them
ever but me; and so no one else ever believes."
" Well-poets are folks who hear the flowers talk
as you do, and the trees, and the seas, and the
beasts, and even the stones; but no one else ever
hears these things, and so, when the poets write
them out, the rest of the world say, ' That is very
fine, no doubt, but only good for dreamers; it will
bake no bread.' I will give you some poetry-for
I think you care more about dreams than about
bread."
"I do not know," said Bebee; and she did not
know, for her dreams, like her youth and her innocence, and her simplicity, and her strength, were
all unconscious of themselves, as such things must
be to be pure and true at all.
Bebee had grown up straight, and clean, and fragrant, and joyous as one of her own carnations;
but she knew herself no more than the carnation
knows its color and its root.
"N o, you do not know," said he, with a sort of
pity; and thought within himself, was it worth
while to let her know?




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES


91


If she did not know, these vague aspirations and
imaginations would drop off from her with the
years of her early youth, as the lime-flowers drop
downwards with the summer heats. She would
forget them. They would linger a little in her
head, and, perhaps, always wake at some sunset
hour or some angelus chime, but not to trouble her.
Only to make her cradle-song a little sadder and
softer than most women's was. Unfed, they would
sink away and bear no blossom.
She would grow into a simple, hardy, hard-working, God-fearing Flemish woman like tie rest.
She would marry, no doubt, some time, and rear
her children honestly and well; and sit in the
market-stall every day, and spin and sew, and dig
and wash, and sweep, and brave bad weather, and
be content with poor food to the end of her harmless and laborious days-poor little  ebebe!
IIe saw her so clearly as she would be-if he let
her alone.
A little taller, a little broader, a little browner,
less sweet of voice, less soft of skin, less flower-like
in tace; having learned to think only as her neighbors thought, of price of wood and cost of bread;
laboring cheerily but hardly from daybreak to
nightfall to fill hungry mouths; forgetting all
things except the little curly-heads clustered round
her soup-pot, and the year-old lips sucking at her
breasts.
A blameless life, an eventless life, a life as clear
as the dew-drop, and as colorless; a life opening,




92      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


passing, ending in the little green wooded lane, by
the bit of water where the swans made their nests
under the willows; a life like the life of millions,
a little purer, a little brighter, a little nlore tender,
perhaps, than those lives usually are, but otherwise
as like them as one ear of barley is like another as
it rises from the soil, and blows in the wind, and
turns brown in the strong summer sun, and then
goes down to the sod again under the sickle.
lie saw her just as she would be-if he let her
alone.
But should he leave her alone?
IIe cared nothing; only her eyes had such a
pretty, fiank, innocent look like a bird's in them,
and she had been so brave and bold with him
about those silken stockings; and this little ignorant, dreamful mind of hers was so like a blush
rosebud, which looks so close-shut, and so sweetsmelling, and so tempting fold within fold, that a
child will pull it open, forgetful that he will spoil
it forever from being a full-grown rose, and that
he will let the dust, and the sun, and the bee into
its tender bosom-and men are true children, and
women are their rosebuds.
Thinking only of keeping well with this strange
and beautiful wayfarer from that unknown paradise
of Rubes' country, Be6be lifted up the vine-leaves
of her basket.
" I took a flower for you to-day, but it is dead.
Look-to-morrow, if you will be there, you sliall
have the best in all the garden."




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


93


"You wish to see me again then?" he asked her.
Bebee looked at him with troubled eyes, but with
a sweet frank faith that had no hesitation in it.
"Yes! you are not like anything I ever knew,
and if you will only help me to learn a little. Sometimes I think I am not stupid, only ignorant-but
I cannot be sure unless I try."
IIe smiled; he was listlessly amused; the day before he had tempted the child merely because she
was pretty, and to tempt her in that way seemed
the natural course of things, but now there was
something in her that touched him differently; the
end would be the same, but he would change the
means.
The sun had set. There was a low, dull red glow
still on the far edge of the plains-that was all. In
the distant cottages little lights were twinkling.
The path grew dark.
" I will go away and let her alone," he thought.
"Poor little soul! it would give itself'lavishly, it
would never be bought. I will let it alone; the
mind will go to sleep and the body will keep
healthy and strong and pure, as people call it. It
would be a pity to play with both a day, and then
throw them away as the boy threw the pear-blossom.
She is a little clod of earth that has field-flowers
growing in it. I will let her alone, the flowers
under the plow in due course will die, and she
will be content among the other clods,-if I let
her alone."
At that moment there went across the dark fields,




94      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


against the dusky red sky,a young man with a pile
of brushwood on his back, and a hatchet in his
hand.
"( You are late, Bebee," he called to her in Flemish, and scowled at the stranger by her side.
"A good-looking lad-who is it?" said her companion.
"That is Jeannot, the son of old Sophie," she
answered him. " IIe is so good-oh, so good, you
cannot think; he keeps his mother and three little
sisters, and works so very, very hard in the forest,
and yet he often finds time to dig my garden for
me, and he chops all my wood in winter."
They had conie to where the road goes up by
the king's summer-palace. They were under great
hanging beeches and limes.  There was a high
gray wall, and over it the blossoming fruit-boughs
hung. In a ditch full of long grass little kids
bleated by their mothers. Away on the left went
the green fields of colza, and beetroot, and trefoil,
with big forest-trees here and there in their midst,
and, against the blue low line of the far horizon,
red mill-sails, and gray church spires; dreamy
plaintive bells far away somewhere were ringing
the sad, Flemish carillon.
IHe paused and looked at her.
"I must bid you good-night, Beb6e-you are
near your home now."
She paused too and looked at him.
"But I shall see you to-morrow?"
There was the wistful, eager, anxious uncon



TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


95


sciousness of appeal as when the night before she
had asked him if he were angry.
lIe hesitated a moment. If he said no, and
went away out of tlle city wherever his listless and
changeful whim called him, he knew how it would
be with her; he knew what her life would be as
surely as he knew the peach would come-out of
tlhe peach-flower rosy on the wall there: life in the
little hut; among the neighbors; sleepy and safe
and soulless;-if le let ler alonce.
If lie stayed aCnd saw her on tile morrow he knew,
too, the end as surely as lie knew tlat the b)rtch
of white pear-blossom which in carelessness he hiad
knocked down with a stone on the grass yonder,
would fade in the night and would never bring
forth its sweet, simple fruit in the sunshine.
To leave the peach-flower to conie to maturity
and be plucked by a peasant-or to pull down the
pear-blossom and rifle tile buds?
Carelessly and languidly he balanced the question witll himself, whilst Bebe'e, forgetful of the
lace patterns and the flight of the hours, stood
looking at him with anxious and pleading eyes,
tilnkin   only-was he angry again, or would he
really bring her the books and make her wise, and
let lher know the stories of the past?
" Shall I see you to-morrow?" she said wistfully.
Should she?-if he left the peach-blossom safe
on the wall, Jea!nnot tile woodcutter would come
by-and-by and gather the fruit.




96      TIWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


If he left the clod of earth in its pasture with all
its daisies untouched, this black-browed young
peasant would cut it round with his hatchet and
carry it to his wicker cage, that the homely brown
lark of his love might sing to it some stupid wood
note under a cottage eave.
The sight of the strong young forester going
over the darkened fields against the dull red skies
was as a feather that suffices to sway to one side a
balance that hangs on a hair.
lie had been inclined to leave her alone when
he saw in his fancy the clean, simple, mindless,
honest life that her fanciful girlhood would settle
down into as time should go on. But when in the
figure of the woodman there was painted visibly
on the dusky sky that end for her which he had
foreseen, he was not indifferent to it; he resented
it; he was stirred to a vague desire to render it
impossible.
If Jeannot had not gone by across the fields he
would have left her and let her alone from that
night thenceforwards; as it was,"Good-night, Be'be," he said to her.  "Tomorrow I will finish the Broodhuis and bring you
your first book. Do not dream too much, or you
will prick your lace patterns all awry. Good-night,
pretty one."
Then he turned and went back through the
green dim lanes to the city.
Bebee stood a moment looking after him, with
a happy smile; then she picked up the fallen




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


97


peach-bough, and ran home as fast as her feet
would take her.
That night she worked very late watering her
flowers, and trimming them, and then ironing out
a little clean white cap for the morrow; and then
sitting down under the open lattice to prick out all
old Annemie's designs by the strong light of the
full moon that flooded her hut with its radiance.
But she sang all the time she worked, and the
gay, pretty, wordless songs floated across the
water and across the fields, and woke some old
people in their beds as they lay with their windows open, and they turned and crossed themselves, and said, " Dear heart!-this is the Eve of
the Ascension, and the angels are so near we hear
them."
But it was no angel; only the thing that is nearer
heaven than anything else-a little human heart
that is happy and innocent.
Bebee had only one sorrow that night.  The
peach-blossoms were all dead-and no care could
call them back even for an hour's blooming.
"He did not think when he'struck them down,"
she said to herself, regretfully.


9




CHAPTER       VIII.
AN I do any work for you, Bebee?" said
black Jeannot in the daybreak, pushing
her gate open timidly with one hand.
"There is none to do, Jeannot. They want so
little in this time of the year-the flowers," said
she, lifting her head from the sweet-peas she was
tying up to their sticks.
The woodman did not answer; he leaned over
the half-open wicket, and swayed it backwards
and forwards under his bare arm. He was a good,
harmless, gentle fellow, swarthy as charcoal and
simple as a child, and quite ignorant; having spent
all his days in the great Soignies forests making
fagots when he was a little lad, and hewing down
trees or burning charcoal as he grew to manhood.
"Who was that seigneur with you.last night,
Bebee?" he asked, after a long silence, watching
her as she moved.
Bebee's eyes grew very soft, but they looked up
frankly.
" I am not sure-I think he is a painter-a great
painter-prince, I mean-as Rubes was in Ant98




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


99


werpen; he wanted roses the night before last in
the cathedral."
"But he was walking with you?"
"Hie was in the lane as I came home last night
-yes."
"What does he give you for your roses?"
" Oh-he pays me well. How is your mother
this day, Jeannot?"
" You do not like to talk of him?"
"Why should you want to talk of him?-he is
nothing to you."
"Did you really see him only two days ago,
Bebee?"
"Oh, Jeannot!-did I ever tell a falsehood?you would not say that to one of your little sisters."
The forester swayed the gate to and fro drearily
under his folded arms.
Bebee, not regarding him, cut her flowers, and
filled her baskets, and did her other work, and set
a ladder against the hut and climbed on its low
roof to seek for eggs, the hens having green tastes
sometimes for the rushes and lichens of its thatch.
She found two eggs, which she promised herself
to take to Annemie, and looking round as she sat
on the edge of the roof, with one foot on the highest rung of the ladder, saw that Jeannot was still
at the gate.
"You will be late in the forest, Jeannot," she
cried to him. "It is such a long, long way in and
out. Why do you look so sulky? and you are
kicking the wicket to pieces."




100


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


"I do not like you to talk with strangers," said
Jeannot, sullenly and sadly.
Bebee laughed as she sat on the edge of the
thatch, and looked at the shining gray skies of the
early day, and the dew-wet garden, and the green
fields beyond, with happy eyes that made the
familiar scene transfigured to her.
" Oh, Jeannot, what nonsense! As if I do not
talk to a million strangers every summer! as if I
could ever sell a flower if I did not! You are
cross this morning-that is what it is."
"Do you know the man's name?" said Jeannot,
suddenly.
Bebee felt her cheeks grow warm as with some
noonday heat of sunshine.  She thought it was
with anger against blundering Jeannot's curiosity.
"No! and what would his name be to us, if I
did know it? I cannot ask people's names because
they buy my roses."
"As if it were only roses!-"
There was the length of the garden between
them, and Bebee did not hear as she sat on the
edge of her roof with that light dreamful enjoyment of air and sky and coolness, and all the
beauty of the dawning day, which the sweet vague
sense of a personal happiness will bring with it to
the dullest and the coldest.
"You are cross, Jeannot, that is what it is," she
said, after awhile.  "You should not be cross;
you are too big and strong and good. Go in and
get my bowl of bread and milk for me, and hand




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHIOES.


101


it to me up here. It is so pleasant. It is as nice
as being perched on an apple-tree."
Jeannot went in obediently and handed up her
breakfast to her, looking at her with shy, worshiping eyes. But his face was overcast, and hesighed
heavily as he took up his hatchet and turned away;
for he was the sole support of his mother and
sisters, and if he did not do his work in Soignies
they would starve at home.
"You will be seeing that stranger again?" he
asked her.
"Yes!" she answered, with a glad triumph in
her eyes; not thinking at all of him as she spoke.
"You ought to go, Jeannot, now; you are so late.
I will come and see your mother to-morrow. And
do not be cross, you dear big Jeannot. Days are
too short to snip them up into little bits by bad
temper; it is only a stupid sheep-shearer that spoils
the fleece by snapping at it sharp and hard-that
is what Father Francis says."
Bebee having delivered her little piece of wisdom, broke her bread into her milk and ate it, lifting her face to the fresh wind and tossing crumbs
to the wheeling swallows, and watching the rosebushes nod and toss below in the breeze, and thinking vaguely how happy a thing it was to live.
Jeannot looked up at her, then went on his slow
sad way through the wet lavender-shrubs and the
opening buds of the lilies.
"You will only think of that stranger, Bebee,
never of any of us-never again," he said; and
9.




102


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


wearily opened the little gate and went through it,
and down the daybreak stillness of the lane. It
was a foolish thing to say; but when were lovers
ever wise?
Bebee did not heed; she did not understand herself or him; she only knew that she was happy;
when one knows that, one does not.want to seek
much further.
She sat on the thatch and took her bread and
milk in the gray clear air, with the swallows circling
above her head, and one or two of them even resting a second on the edge of the bowl to peck at the
food from the big wooden spoon; they had known
her all the sixteen summers of her life, and were
her playfellows, only they would never tell her anything of what they saw in winter over the seas.
That was her only quarrel with them. Swallows
do not tell their secrets. They have the weird of
Procne on them all.
The sun came and touched the lichens of the
roof into gold.
Bebee smiled at it gayly as it rose above the tops
of the trees, and shone on all the little villages
scattered over the plains.
" Ah, dear Sun!" she cried to it. "I am going
to be wise. I am going into great Rubes' country.
I am going to hear of the Past and the Future. I
am going to listen to what the Poets say. The
swallows never would tell me anything; but now
I shall know as much as they know. Are you not
glad for me, O Sun?"




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


103


The Sun came over the trees, and heard and said
nothing. If he had answered at all he must have
said,"The only time when a human soul is either
wise or happy, is in that one single moment when the
hour of my own shining or of the moon's beaming
seems to that single soul to be past and present
and future, to be at once the creation and the end
of all things. Faust knew that; so will you."
But the Sun shone on and held his peace. Ile
sees all things ripen and fall. IIe can wait. He
knows the end. It is always the same.
IIe brings the fiuit out of the peach-flower, and
rounds it and touches it into ruddiest rose and softest gold; but the sun knows well that the peach
must drop-whether into the basket to be eaten by
kings, or on to the turf to be eaten by ants. What
matter which very much after all?
The Sun is not a cynic; he is only wise because
he is Life and he is Death, the creator and the
corrupter of all things.




V IN  a - - -                          NOW219p0~al   Ri MP



(rrarsse8a#e-ie;rrwL3r~nweaRI


CHAPTER IX.


UT Bebee, who only saw in the sun the
sign of daily work, the brightness of the
face of the world, the friend of the flowers,
the harvest-man of the poor, the playmate of the
birds and butterflies, the kindly light that the
waking birds and the ringing carillon welcomedBebee, who was not at all afraid of him, smiled at
his rays and saw in them only fairest promise of a
cloudless midsummer day as she gave her last
crumb to the swallows, dropped down off the
thatch, and busied herself in making bread that
Mbre Krebs would bake for her, until it was time
to cut her flowers and go down into the town.
When her loaves were made and she had run
over with them to the mill-house and back again,
she attired herself with more heed than usual,
and ran to look at her own face in the mirror of
the deep well-water-other glass she had none.
She was used to hear herself called pretty; but
she had never thought about it at all till now.
The people loved her; she had always believed
that they had only said it as a sort of kindness, as
they said, " God keep you."  But now104




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


105


" Ie told me I was like a flower," she thought
to herself, and hung over the well to see..She
did not know very well what he had meant; but
the sentence stirred in her heart as a little bird
under tremulous leaves.
She waited ten minutes full, leaning and looking down, while her eyes, that were like the blue
iris, smiled back to her from the brown depths
below. Then she went and kneeled down before
the old shrine in the wall of the garden.
"Dear and holy Mother of Jesus, I do thank
you that you made me a little good to look at,"
she said, softly. " Keep me as you keep the
flowers, and let my face be always fair, because
it is a pleasure to be a pleasure. Ah, dear Mother,
I say it so badly, and it sounds so vain, I know.
But I do not think you will be angry, will you?
And I am going to try to be wise."
Then she murmured an ave or two, to be in
form as it were, and then rose and ran along the
lanes with her baskets, and brushed the dew lightly
over her hare feet, and sang a little Flemish song
for very joyousness, as the birds sing in the applebough.
She got the money for Annemie and took it to
her with fresh patterns to prick, and the new-laid
eggs.
" I wonder what he meant by a dog's heart?"
she thought to herself, as she left the old woman
sitting by the hole in the roof pricking out the
parchment in all faith that she earned her money,




106


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


and looking every now and then through the
forests of masts for the brig with the hank of flax
flying,-the brig that had foundered fifty long years
before in the northern seas, and in the days of her
youth.
"What is the dog's heart?" thought Bebee;
she had seen a dog she knew-a dog who all his
life long had dragged heavy loads under brutal
stripes along the streets of Brussels-stretch himself on the grave of his taskmaster and refuse to
eat, and persist in lying there until he died, though
he had no memory except of stripes, and no tie to
the dead except pain and sorrow. Was it a heart
like this that he meant?
"Was her sailor, indeed, so good to her?" she
asked an old gossip of Ann mie's, as she went down
the stairs.
The old soul stopped to think with difficulty of
such a far-off time, and resting her brass flagon of
milk on the steep step.
" Eh, no; not that I ever saw," she answered at
length. " He was fond of her-very fond; but he
was a willful one, and he beat her sometimes when
he got tired of being on land. But women must
not mind that, you know, my dear, if only a man's
heart is right. Things fret them, and then they belabor what they love best; it is a way they have.
"But she speaks of him as of an angel nearly!"
said Bebee, bewildered.
The old woman took up her flagon, with a smile
flitting across her wintry face.




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.       107
" Ay, dear; when the frost kills your brave rosebush, root and bud, do you think of the thorns
that pricked you, or only of the fair, sweet-smelling things that flowered all your summer?"
Be6be went away thoughtfully out of the old
crazy water-washed house by the quay; life
seemed growing very strange and intricate and
knotted about her, like the threads of lace that a
bad fairy has entangled in the night.




CHAPTER X.
ER stranger from Rubes' land was a great
man in a certain world. lie had become
great when young, which is perhaps a misfortune. It indisposes men to be great at their
maturity. IHe was famous at twenty, by a picture
hectic in color, perfect in drawing, that made
Paris at his feet. IIe became more famous by
verses, by plays, by political follies, and by social
successes. lie was faithful, however, to his first
love in art. Ie was a great painter, and year by
year proved afresh the cunning of his hand.
Purists said his pictures had no soul inl them.
It was not wonderful if they had none.   He
always painted soulless vice; indeed, he saw very
little else.
One year he had some political trouble. He
wrote a witty pamphlet that hurt where it was
perilous to aim. IIe laughed and crossed the border, riding into the green Ardennes one sunny
evening.  IIe had a name of some power and
sufficient wealth; he did not fear long exile.
Meanwhile it told himself he would go and look
at Schefter's Gretchen.
108




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


109


The King of Thule is better; but people talk
most of the Gretchen. He had never seen either.
He went in leisurely, traveling up the bright
Meuse River, and across the monotony of the plains,
then green with wheat a foot high, and musical
with the many bells of the Easter kermesses in
the quaint old-world villages.
There was something so novel, so sleepy, so harmless, so mediaeval, in the Flemish life, that it soothed
him. IIe had been swimming all his life in salt seafed rapids; this sluggish, dull canal-water, mirroring between its rushes a life that had scarcely
changed for centuries, had a charm for him.
IIe stayed awhile in Antwerpen. The town is
ugly and beautiful; it is like a dull quaint gres de
Flandre jug, that has precious stones set inside its
rim. It is a burgher ledger of bales and barrels,
of sale and barter, of loss and gain; but in the
heart of it there are illuminated leaves of missal
vellum, all gold and color, and monkish story and
heroic ballad, that could only have been executed
in the days when Art was a religion.
HIe gazed himself into an homage of Rubens,
whom before he had slighted, never having known
(for, unless you have seen Antwerp, it is as absurd
to say that you have seen Rubens, as it is to think
that you have seen Murillo out of Seville, or Raffaelle out of Rome); and he studied the Gretchen
carefully, delicately, sympathetically, for he loved
Scheffer; but though he tried, he failed to care
for her.
10




110


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SIOES.


"She is only a peasant; she is not a poem," he
said to himself; "I will paint a Gretchen for the
Salon of next year."
But it was hard for him to portray a Gretchen.
All his pictures were Phryne-Phryne in triumph,
in ruin, in a palace, in a poor-house, on a bed of
roses, on a hospital mattress; Phryne laughing with
a belt of jewels about her supple waist; Phryne
lying with the stones of the dead-house under her
naked limbs-but always Phryne. Phryne, who
living had death in her smile; Phryne, who lifeless
had blank despair on her face; Phryne, a thing
that lived furiously every second of her days, but
Phryne a thing that once being dead was carrion
that never could live again.
Phryne has many painters in this school, as many
as Catherine and Cecilia had in the schools of the
Renaissance, and he was chief amidst them.
I-ow could he paint Gretchen if the pure Scheffer
missed? Not even if, like the artist monks of old,
he steeped his brushes all Lent through in holy
water.
And in holy water he did not believe.
One evening, having left Antwerpen ringing its
innumerable bells over the grave of its dead Art,
he leaned out of the casement of an absent friend's
old palace in the Brabant street that is named after
Mary of Burgundy; an old casement crusted with
quaint carvings, and gilded round in Spanish fashion, with many gargoyles and griffins, and illegible
scutcheons.




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


111


Leaning there, wondering with himself whether
he would wait awhile and paint quietly in this dim
street, haunted with the shades of Memling and
Maes, and Otto Veneris and Philip de Champagne,
or whether he would go into tle East and seek new
types, and lie under the red Egyptian heavens and
create a true Cleopatra, which no man has ever done
yet-a young Cleopatra, ankle-deep in roses and
fresh from Caesar's kisses-leaning there, he saw a
little peasant go by below, with two little white
feet in two wooden shoes, and a face that had the
pure and simple radiance of a flower.
"There is my Gretchen," he thought to himself,
and went down and followed her into the cathedral. If he could get what was in her face, he
would get what Scheffer could not.
A little later, walking by her in the green lanes,
he meditated, "It is the face of Gretchen, but not
the soul-the Red Mouse has never passed this
child's lips. Nevertheless- "
":Nevertheless- " he said to himself, and
smiled.
For he, the painter all his life long of Phryne
living and of Phryne dead, believed that every
daughter of Eve either vomits the Red Mouse or
swallows it.
It makes so little difference which,-either way
the Red Mouse has been there.
And yet, strolling there in the dusky red of the
evening towards this little rush-covered hut, he forgot the Red Mouse, and began vague'y to see that




112      TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
there are creatures of his mother's sex from whom
the beast of the Brocken slinks away.
But he still said to himself, " Nevertheless."
"Nevertheless,"-for he knew well that when
the steel cuts the silk, when the hound hunts the
fawn, when the snake wooes the bird, when the king
covets the vineyard, there is only one end possible
at any time. It is the strong against the weak, the
fierce against the feeble, the subtle against the
simple, the master against the slave; there is no
equality in the contest and no justice-it is merely
inevitable, and the issue of it is written.




ICidP~KPT;~


1 aaailcasesilPs:ggs I


CHAPTER XI.


TIE next day she had her promised book
hidden under the vine-leaves of her empty
basket as she went homeward, and though
she had not seen him very long or spoken to him
very much, she was happy.
The golden gates of knowledge had just opened
to her; she saw a faint, far-off glimpse of the Hesperides gardens within; of the dragon she had
never heard, and had no fear.
" Might I know your name?" she had asked him
wistfully, as she had given him the rosebud, and
taken the volume in return that day.
"They call me Flamen."
"It is your name?"
"Yes, for the world. You must call me Victor,
as other women do. Why do you want my name?
" Jeannot asked it of me."
"Oh, Jeannot asked it, did he?"
"Yes; besides," said Bebee, with her eyes very
soft and very serious, and her happy voice hushed,
"besides, I want to pray for you of course, every
day; and if I do not know your name, how can I
make Our Lady rightly understand? The flowers
10*             H                113




114


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


know you without a name, but she might not, because so very many are always beseeching her, and
you see she has all the world to look after."
He had looked at her with a curious look, and
had bade her farewell, and let her go home alone
that night.
Her work was quickly done, and by the light of
the moon she spread her book on her lap in the
porch of the hut and began her new delight.
The children had come and pulled at her skirts
and begged her to play. But Bebee had shaken
her head.
" I am going to learn to be very wise, dear," she
told them; " I shall not have time to dance or to
play."
" But people are not merry when they are wise,
Be'be," said Franz, the biggest boy.
"Perhaps not," said Bebee; " but one cannot be
everything, you know, Franz."
"But surely, you would rather be merry than
anything else?"
" I think there is something better, Franz. I am
not sure; I want to find out; I will tell you when
I know."
"Who has put that into your head, Bebee?"
"The angels in the cathedral," she told them;
and the children were awed and left her, and went
away to play blind-man's-buff by themselves, on the
grass by the swan's water.
"But for all that the angels have said it," said
Franz to his sisters, " I cannot see what good it will




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


115


be to her to be wise, if she will not care any longer
afterwards for almond ginger-bread, and currantcake."
It was the little tale of " Paul and Virginia" that
he had given her to begin her studies with; but it
was a grand copy, full of beautiful drawings nearly
at every page.
It was hard work for her to read at first, but the
drawings enticed and helped her, and she soon sank
breathlessly into the charm of the story. Many
words she did not know; many passages were
beyond her comprehension; she was absolutely
ignorant, and had nothing but the force of her own
fancy to aid her.
But though stumbling at every step, as a lame
child through a flowery hillside in summer, she was
happy as the child would be, because of the sweet,
strange air that was blowing about her, and the
blossoms that she could gather into her hand, so
rare, so wonderful, and yet withal so familiar, because they were blossoms.
With her fingers buried in her curls, with her
book on her knee, with the moonrays white and
strong on the page, Bebee sat entranced as the
hours went by; the children's play shouts died
away; the babble of the gossip at the house doors
ceased; people went by and called good-night to
her; the little huts shut up one by one, like the
white and purple convolvulus cups in the hedges.
Bebee did not stir, nor did she hear them; she
was deaf even to the singing of the nightingales in




116


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


the willows, where she sat in her little dark porch,
with the ivy dropping from the thatch above, and
the wet garden-ways beyond her.
A heavy step came tramping down the lane. A
voice called to her," What are you doing, Bebee, there this time of
the night? It is on the strike of twelve."
She started as if she were doing some evil thing,
and stretched her armns out, and looked around with
blinded, wondering eyes, as if she had been rudely
wakened from her sleep.
" What are you doing up so late?" asked Jeannot; he was coming from the forest in the dead of
night to bring food for his family; he lost his sleep
thus often, but he never thought that he did anything except his duty in those long, dark, tiring
tramps to and fro between Soignies and Laeken.
Bebee shut her book and smiled with dreaming
eyes, that saw him not at all.
"I was reading -  and, Jeannot, his name is
Flamen for the world-but I may call him Victor."
" What do I care for his name?"
"You asked it this morning."
"More fool I. Why do you read? Reading is
not for poor folk like you and me."
Bebe smiled up at the white clear moon that
sailed above the woods.
She was not awake out of her dream. She only
dimly heard the words he spoke.
" You are a little peasant," said Jeannot roughly,




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


117


as he paused at the gate. " It is all you can do to
get your bread. You have no one to stand between
you and hunger. Iow will it be with you when
the slug gets your roses, and the snail your carnations, and your hens die of damp, and your lace is
all wove awry, because your head runs on reading
and folly, and you are spoilt for all simple pleasures and for all honest work?"
She smiled, still looking up at the moon, with
the dropping ivy touching her hair.
"You are cross, dear Jeannot. Good-night."
A moment afterwards the little rickety door was
shut, and the rusty bolt drawn within it; Jeannot
stood in the cool summer night all alone, and knew
how stupid he had been in his wrath.
He leaned on the gate a minute; then crossed
the garden as softly as his wooden shoes would let
him. He tapped gently on the shutter of the lattice.
"Bebee-Bebee-just listen. I spoke roughly,
dear-I know I have no right. I am sorry. Will
you be friends with me again? —do be friends
again."
She opened. the shutter a little way, so that he
could see her pretty mouth speaking.
"Oh, Jeannot, what does it matter? Yes, we are
friends-we will always be fiiends, of course-only
you do not know. Good-night."
Ile went away with a heavy heart and a longdrawn step. IIe would have preferred that she
should have been angry with him.
Bebee, left alone, let the clothes drop off her




118     TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
pretty round shoulders and her rosy limbs, and
shook out her coils of hair, and kissed the book,
and laid it under her head, and went to sleep with
a smile on her face.
Only, as she slept, her fingers moved as if she
were counting her beads, and her lips murmured.
"Oh, dear Holy Mother, you have so much to
think of-yes, I know-all the poor, and all the
little children. But take care of him; he is called
Flamen, and he lives in the street of Mary of
Burgundy; you cannot miss him; and if you will
look for him always, and have a heed that the
angels never leave him, I will give you my great
cactus flower- my only one —on your Feast of
Roses this very year. Oh, dear Mother, you will
not forget!"




CHAPTER       XII.
IEBEE was a dreamer in her way, and
aspired to be a scholar too. But all the
same, she was not a little fool.
She had been reared in hardy, simple, honest
ways of living, and would have thought it as
shameful as a theft to have owed her bread to
other folk.
So, though she had a wakeful, restless night,
full of strange phantasies, none the less was she
out in her garden by daybreak; none the less did
she sweep out her floor and make her mash for the
fowls, and wash out her bit of linen and hang it
to dry on a line among the tall, flaunting hollyhocks that were so proud of themselves because
they reached to the roof.
"What do you want with books, Bebee?" said
Reine, the sabot-maker's wife, across the privet
hedge, as she also hung out her linen. "Franz
told me you were reading last night. It is the
silver buckles have done that: one nischief always
begets another."
"Where is the mischief, good Reine?" said
Bebe, who was always prettily behaved with her
119




120


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


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




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


121


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 Beibee 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 cuckooclock at Mere Krebs's-the only clock in the laneshould 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 the delight
of watching through the shifting colors and shadows
of the throngs for one face and for one smile.
"HIe is sure to be there," she thought, and started
half an hour earlier than was her wont. She
wanted to tell him all her rapture in the book-no
one else could understand.
But all the day through he never came.
Bebee sat with a sick heart and a parched little
throat, selling her flowers and straining her eyes
through the tumult of the square.
The whole day went by, and there was no sign
of him.
11




122


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


The flowers had sold well: it was a feast-day;
her pouch was full of pence-what was that to her?
She went and prayed in the cathedral, but it
seemed cold, and desolate, and empty; even the
storied windows seemed dark.
" Perhaps he is gone out of the city," she thought;
and a terror fell on her that frightened her, it was
so unlike any fear that se' had ever known-even
the fear when she had seen death on old Antoine's
face had been nothing like this.
Going home through the streets, she passed the
cafe of the Trois Freres that looks out on the trees
of the park, and that has flowers in its balconies,
and pleasant windows that stand open to let the
sounnds of the soldiers' music enter. She saw him
in one of the windows. There were amber and
scarlet and black; silks and satins and velvets.
There was a fan painted and jeweled. There
were women's faces. There was a heap of purple
fruit, and glittering sweetmeats.  lie laughed
there.  His beautiful Murillo head was dark
against the white and gold within.
Bebee looked up-paused a second,-then went
onward, with a thorn in her heart.
lie liad not seen her.
"It is natural, of course —he has his world-he
does not think often of me-there is no reason
why he should be as good as he is," she said
to herself as she went slowly over the stones.
She had the dog's soul-only she did not
know it.




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


123


But the tears fell down her cheeks, as she
walked.
It looked so bright in there, so gay, with the
soundl of the music comingl in throurgh the trees,
and those women-she had seen such women
before; sometimes in the winter nights, going
home from the lace-work, she had stopped at the
doors of the palaces, or of the opera-house, when
the carriages were setting down their brilliant
burdens; and sometimes on the great feast-days
she had seen the people of the court going out to
some gala at the theatre, or some great review of
troops, or some ceremonial of foreign sovereigns;
but she had never thought about them before;
she had never wondered whether velvet was better
to wear than woolen serge, or diamonds lighter on
the head than a little cap of linen.
But nowThose women seemed to her so dazzlingly, so
wondrously, so superhumanly beautiful; they
seemed like some of those new dahlia flowers,
rose and purple and gold, that outblazed the sun
on the south border of her little garden, and
blanched all the soft color out of the homely
roses, and pimpernels, and sweet-williams, and
double-stocks, that had bloomed there ever since
the days of Waterloo.
But, the dahlias had no scent-and Bebee wondered if these women had any heart in themthey looked all laughter, and glitter, and vanity.
To the child, whose dreams of womanhood were




124


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


evolved from the face of the Mary of the Assumption, of the Susannah of Mieris, and of that Angel
in the blue coif whose face has a light as of the
sun,-to her who had dreamed her way into vague
perceptions of her own sex's maidenhood and
maternity by help of those great pictures which had
been before her sight from infancy, there was some
taint, some artifice, some want, some harshness in
these jeweled women; she could not have reasoned about it, but she felt it, as she felt that the
grand dahlias missed a flower's divinity, being
scentless.
She was a little bit of wild thyme herself; hardy,
fragrant, clean, tender, flowering by the wayside,
full of honey, though only nourished on the turf
and the stones-these gaudy, brilliant, ruby-bright,
scarlet-mantled dahlias hurt her with a dini sense
of pain and shame.
Fasting, next day at sunrise she confessed to
Father Francis:
"I saw beautiful rich women, and I envied
them; and I could not pray to Mary last night for
thinking of them-for I hated them so much."
But she did not say," I hated them because they were with him."
Out of the purest little soul, Love entering drives
forth Candor.
"That is not like you at all, Bbe6e," said the
good old man, as she knelt at his feet on the bricks
of his little bare study, where all the books he ever
spelt out were treatises on the art of bee-keeping




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.       125
"My dear, you never were covetous at all, nor did
you ever seem to care for tile things of the world.
I wish Jehan had not given you those silver
buckles; I think they have set your little soul on
vanities."
" It is not the buckles; I am not covetous," said
Bebee; and then her face grew warm.  She did
not know why, and she did not hear the rest of
Father Francis's admonitions.
11*




CHAPTER XIII.
UT the next noon-time brought him to the
market-stall, and the next also, and so the
summer days slipped away, and Bebee was
quite happy if she saw him in the morning-time, to
give him a fresh rose, or at evening by the gates,
or under the beech-trees, when he brought her a
new book, and sauntered awhile up the green lane
beside her.
An innocent, unconscious love like Bebee's wants
so little food to make it all content. Such mere
trifles are beautiful and sweet to it. Such slender
stray gleams of light suffice to make a broad, bright
golden noon of perfect joy around it.
All the delirium, and fever, and desire, and despair, that are in maturer passion, are far away from
it: far as is the flash of the meteor across sultry
skies from the blue forget-me-not down in the
brown meadow brook.
It was very wonderful to Bebee that he, this
stranger from Rubes' Fairy-land, could come at all
to keep pace with her little clattering wooden shoes
over the dust and the grass in the dim twilighttime.  The days went by in a trance of sweet
126




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


127


amaze, and she kept count of the hours no more
by the cuckoo-clock of the millhouse, or the deep
chimes of the Brussels belfries; but only by such
moments as brought her a word from his lips, or
'even a glimpse of him from afar, across the crowded
square.
She sat up half the nights reading the books he
gave her, studying the long cruel polysyllables, and
spelling slowly through the phrases that seemed to
her so cramped and tangled, and which yet were
a pleasure to unravel for sake of the thought they
held.
For Bebee, ignorant little simple soul that she
was, had a mind in her that was eager, observant,
quick to acquire, skillful to retain; and it would
happen in certain times that Flamen, speaking to
her of the things which he gave to her to read,
would think to himself that this child had more
wisdom than was often to be found in schools.
Meanwhile he pondered various studies in various stages of a Gretchen, and made love to Bebee
-made love at least by his eyes and by his voice,
not hurrying his pleasant task, but hovering about
her softly, and mindful not to scare her, as a man
will gently lower his hand over a poised butterfly
that he seeks to kill, and which one single movement, a thought too quick, may scare away to safety.
Bebee knew where he lived in the street of Mary
of Burgundy; in an old palace that belonged to a
great Flemish noble, who never dwelt there himself; but to ask anything about him-why he was




128


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


there? what his rank was? why he stayed in the
city at all? was a sort of treason that never entered
her thoughts.
Psyche, if she had been as simple and loyal as
Bebee was, would never have lighted her own
candle; but even Psyche would not have borrowed
any one else's lamp to lighten the love darkness.
To Bebee he was sacred, unapproachable, unquestionable; he was a wonderful, perfect happiness that had fallen into her life; he was a gift of
God, as the sun was.
She took his going and coming as she took that
of the sun, never dreaming of reproaching his absence, never dreaming of asking if in the empty
night he shone on any other worlds than hers.
It was hardly so much a faith with her as an instinct; faith must reason ere it know itself to be
faith. Bebe never reasoned any more than her
roses did.
The good folks in the market-place watched her
a little anxiously: they thought ill of that little
moss-rose that every day found its way to one
wearer only; but after all they did not see much,
and the neighbors nothing at all. For he never
went home to her, nor with her, and most of the
time that he spent with Bebee was in the quiet
evening shadows, as she went up with her empty
basket through the deserted country roads.
Bebee was all day long in the city, indeed, as
other girls were, but with her it had always been
different. Antoine had always been with her up to




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


129


the day of his death; and after his death she had
sat in the same place, surrounded by the people
she had known from infancy, and an insult to her
would have been answered by a stroke from the
cobbler's strap or from the tinker's hammer. There
was one girl only who ever tried to do her any
harm-a good-looking, stout wench, who stood at
the corner of the Montagne de la Cour with a stall
of fruit in the summer-time, and in winter-time
drove a milk-cart over the snow. This girl would
get at her sometimes, and talk of the students, and
tell her how good it was to get out of the town on a
holiday, and go to any one of the villages where
there was Kermesse and dance, and drink the little
blue wine, and have trinkets bought for one, and
come home in the moonlight in a char-A-banc, with
the horns sounding, and the lads singing, and the
ribbons flying from the old horse's ears.
"She is such a little close sly thing!.' thought
the fruit-girl, sulkily. To vice, innocence must
always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.
"We dance almost every evening, the children
and I," Bebee had answered when urged fifty times
by this girl to go to fairs, and balls at the wineshops. "That does just as well. And I have seen
Kermesse once at Malines-it was beautiful.  I
went with Mere Dax, but it cost a great deal I
know, though she did not let me pay."
"You little fool!" the fruit-girl would say, and
grin, and eat a pear.
But the good honest old women who sat about
i




130


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SIOES.


in the Grande Place, hearing, lead always taken
the fruit-girl to task, when they got her by herself.
"Leave the child alone, you mischievous one,"
said they.  "Be content with being base yourself. Look you, Lisette-she is not one like you
to make eyes at the law-students, and pester the
painter lads for a day's outing. Let her be, or we
will tell your mother how you leave the fruit for
the gutter children to pick and thieve, while you
are stealing up the stairs into that young French
fellow's chamber. Oh, oh! a fine beating you will
get when she knows!"
Lisette's mother was a fierce and strong old Brabantoise, who exacted heavy reckoning with her
daughter for every single plum and peach that she
sent out of her dark sweet-smelling fruit-shop to be
sunned in the streets, and under the students' loveglances..
So the girl took heed, and left Bebee alone.
" What should I want her to come with us for?"
she reasoned with herself. " She is twice as pretty
as I am; Jules might take to her instead-who
knows?"
So that she was at once savage and yet triumphant when she saw, as she thought, Bebee drifting
down the high flood of temptation.
" Oh, oh, you dainty one!" she cried one day to
her. " So you would not take the nuts and mulberries that do for us common folk, because you
had a mind for a fine pine out of the hothouses!




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


131


That was all, was it? Eh, well-I do not begrudge
you. Only take care; remember, the nuts and
mulberries last through summer and autumn, and
there are heaps of them on every fair-stall and
street-corner; but the pine —that is eaten in a day,
one spring-time, and its like does not grow in the
hedges. You will have your mouth full of sugar
an hour-and then, eh!-you will go famished all
the year."
" I (o not understand," said Be6be, looking up,
with her thoughts far away, and scarcely hearing
the words spoken to. her.
"Oh, pretty little fool! you understand well
enough," said Lisette, grinnllig, as she rubbed up
a melon. "Does he give you fine things?  You
might let me see."
"No one gives me anything."
"Chut! you want me to believe that. Wliy
Jules is only a lad, and his father is a silk-mercer,
and only gives him a hundred francs a month, but
Jules buys me all I want-somehlow-or do you
think I would take the trouble to set rmy cap straight
wlhen he goes by? lie gave me these ear-rinigs,
look. I wish you would let me see what you get."
But B1ebee had gone away-unheeding-dreaming of Juliet and of Jeanne d'Arc, of whom he
had told her tales.
IIe made sketches of her sometimes, but seldom
pleased himnself.
It was not so easy as he had imagined that it
would prove to portray this little flower-like face,




132


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


with the clear eyes and the child's open brow. IHe
who had painted Phryne so long and faithfully had
got a taint on his brush-he could not paint this
pure, bright, rosy dawn - he who had always
painted the glare of midnight gas on rouge or rags.
Yet he felt that if he could transfer to canvas the
light that was on Be6be's face he would get what
Scheffer had missed. For a time it eluded him.
You shall paint a gold and glistening brocade, or a
fan of peacock's feathers, to perfection, and yet,
perhaps, the dewy whiteness of the humble little
field-daisy shall baffle and escape you.
He felt, too, that he must catch her expression
flying as he would do the flash of a swallow's wing
across a blue sky; he knew that Beb6e, forced to
studied attitudes in an atelier, would be no longer
the ideal that he wanted.
More than once he came and filled in more
fully his various designs in the little hut garden,
among the sweet gray lavender and the golden
disks of the sunflowers; and more than once Bebee
was missed from her place in the front of the
Broodhuis.
The Varnhart children would gather now and
then open-mouthed at the wicket, and Mere Krebs
would shake her head as she went by on her
sheepskin saddle, and mutter that the child's head
would be turned by vanity; and old Jehan would
lean on his stick and peer through the sweet-brier,
and wonder stupidly if this strange man who
could make Bebee's face beam over again upon




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


133


that panel of wood could not give him back his
dead daughter who had been pushed away under
the black earth so long, long before, when the red
mill had been brave and new, the red mill that the
boys and girls called old.
But except these, no one noticed much.
Painters were no rare sights in Brabant.
The people were used to see them coming and
going, making pictures of mud and stones, and
ducks and sheep, and of all common and silly
things.
"What does he pay you, Beb6e?" they used to
ask, with the shrewd Flemish thought after the
main chance.
"Nothing," Bebee would answer, with a quick
color in her face; and they would reply in contemptuous reproof, "Careless little fool; —you
should make enough to buy you wood all winter.
When the man from Ghent painted Trine and her
cow, he gave her a whole gold bit for standing
still so long in the clover. The Krebs would be
sure to lend you her cow if it be the cow that
makes the difference."
Bebee was silent, weeding her carnation-bed;what could she tell them that they would understand?
She seemed so far away from them all-those
good friends of her childhood-now that this wonderful new world of his giving had opened to her
sight.
She lived in a dream.
12




134


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


Whether she sat in the market-place taking
copper coins, or in the moonlight with a book on
her knees, it was all the same. IIer feet ran, her
tongue spoke, her hands worked; she did not
neglect her goat or her garden, she did not forsake
her house labor or her good deeds to old Annmenie;
but all the while she only heard one voice, she only
felt one touch, she only saw one face.
Here and there-one in a million-there is a
female thing that can love like this, once and for
ever.
Such an one is dedicated, birth upwards, to the
Mater Dolorosa.
IIe had something nearer akin to affection for
her tllan he had ever had in his life for anything,
but he was never in love with her-no more in
love with her than with the moss-rosebuds that
she fastened in his breast. Yet he played with
her, because she was such a little, soft, tempting,
female thilng; and because, to see her face flush,
and her heart heave, to feel her fresh feelings stir
into life, and to watch her changes from shyness
to confidence, and fiom frankness again into fear,
was a natural pastime in the lazy golden weather.
That lie spared her as far as he did-when after
all she would have married Jeannot anyhow,-and
that he sketched her face in the open air, and never
entered her hut and never beguiled her to his own
old palace in the city, was a new virtue in himself
for which he hardly knew whether to feel respect
or ridicule; anyway it seemed virtue to him.




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


135


So long as he did not seduce the body it seemed
to him that it could never matter how he slew the
soul-the little, honest, happy, pure, frank soul,
that anlidst its poverty and hardships was like a
robin's song to the winter sun.
"Hoot, toot, pretty innocent, so you are no better than the rest of us," hissed her enemy, Lisette,
the fruit-girl, against her as she went by the stall
one evening as the sun set. "Prut! so it was no
such purity after all that made you never look at
the student lads and the soldiers, eh?-You were
so dainty of taste, you must needs pick and choose,
and, Lord's sake, after all your coyness, to drop at
a beckonintg finger as one may say-polig!-in a
minute, like an apple over-ripe! Oh he, you sly
one!"
Bebee flushed red, in a sort of instinct of offense;
not sure what her fault was, but vaguely stung by
the brutal words.
Bebee walked homeward by him, with her
empty baskets: looked at him with grave wondering eyes.
" What did she mean? I do not understand. I
must have done some wrong-or she thinks so.
Do you know?   "
Flamen laughed, and answered her evasively:
"You have done her the wrong of a fair skin
when hers is brown, and a little foot while hers.
is as big as a trooper's; there is no greater sin,
3Bbe6e, possible in woman to woman."
"Hold your peace, you shrill jade," he added, in




136


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


anger to the fruiterer, flinging at her a crown piece,
that the girl caught, and bit with her teeth with a
chuckle. "Do not heed her, Bebee. She is a
coarse-tongued brute, and is jealous, no doubt."
"Jealous?-of what?"
The word had no meaning to Bebee.
"That I am not a student or a soldier, as her
lovers are."
As her lovers were! Bebee felt her face burn
again. Was he her lover then? The child's innocent body and soul thrilled with a hot, sweet delight and fear comnmingled.
Be3bee was not quite satisfied until she had knelt
down that night and asked the Master of all poor
maidens to see if there were any wickedness in her
heart, hidden there like a bee in a rose, and if there
were to take it out and make her worthier of this
wonderful new happiness in her life.




CIIAPTER XIV.
TlIE next day, waking with a radiant little
soul as a bird in a forest wakes in summer,.
Bebee was all alone in the lane by the
swans' water. In the gray of the dawn all the
good folk except herself and lame old Jehan had
tramped off to a pilgrimage, Liege way, which the
bishop of the city had enjoined on all the faithful
as a sacred duty.
Bebee doing her work, singing, thinking how
good God was, and dreaming over a thousand
fancies of the wonderful stories he had told her,
and of the exquisite delight that would lie for her
in watching for him all through the shining hours,
Bebe felt her little heart leap like a squirrel as the
voice that was the music of heaven to her called
through the stillness,"Good-day, pretty one! you are as early as the
lark, Bebee. I go to Mayence, so I thought I
would look at you one moment as I pass."
Bebee ran down through the wet grass in a tumult of joy.  She had never seen him so early in
the day-never so early as this, when nobody was
up and stirring except birds and beasts and peasant
folk.


12*


137




138


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


She did not know how pretty she looked herself;
like a rain-washed wild rose; her feet gleaming
with dew, her cheeks warm with health and joy;
her sunny clustering hair free from the white cap
and tumbling a little about her throat, because she
had been stooping over the carnations.
Flamen loosed the wicket latch, and thought
there might be better ways of spending the day
than in the gray shadows of old Mechlin.
"Will you give me a draught of water?" he
asked her as he crossed the garden.
"I will give you breakfast," said Bebee, happy
as a bird.  She felt no shame for the smallness
of her home; no confusion at the poverty of her
little place; such embarrassments are born of selfconsciousness, and Bebee had no more self-consciousness than her own sweet, gray lavender-bush
blowing against the door.
The lavender-bush has no splendor like the
roses, has no colors like the hollyhocks; it is a
simple, plain, gray thing that the bees love and
that the cottagers cherish, and that keeps the moth
from the homespun linen, and that goes with the
dead to their graves.
It has many virtues and infinite sweetness, but
it does not know it or think of it; and if the village
girls ever tell it so, it fancies they only praise it out
of kindness as they put its slender fragrant spears
away in their warm bosoms.  B6bee was like her
lavender, and now that this beautiful Purple Emperor butterfly came from the golden sunbeams to




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


139


find pleasure for a second in her freshness, she was
only very grateful, as the lavender-bush was to the
village girls.
"I will give you your breakfast," said Bebee,
flushing rosily with pleasure, and putting away the
ivy coils that he might enter.
"I have very little, you know," she added, wistfully. "Only goat's milk and bread; but if that
will do-and there is some honey-and if you would
eat a salad, I would cut one fiesh."
He did enter, and glanced round him with a
curious pity and wonder both in one.
It was such a little, small, square place; and its
floor was of beaten clay; and its unceiled roof he
could have touched; and its absolute poverty was
so plain,-and yet the child looked so happy in it,
and was so like a flower, and was so dainty and
fresh, and even so full of grace.
She stood and looked at him with frank and
grateful eyes; she could hardly believe that he was
here; he, the stranger of Rubes' land, in her own
little rush-covered home.
But she was not embarrassed by it; she was glad
and proud.
There is a dignity of peasants as well as of kings
-the dignity that comes from all absence of effort,
all freedom from pretense. Bebee had this, and
she had more still than this: she had the absolute
simplicity of childhood with her still.
Some women have it still when they are fourscore.




140


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


She could have looked at him forever, she was
so happy; she cared nothing now for those dazzling dahlias-he had left them; he was actually
here-here in her own, little, dear home, with the
cocks looking in at the threshold, and the sweetpeas nodding at the lattice, and the starling crying " Bonjour! Bonjour!"
"You are tired, I am sure you mu-st be tired,"
she said, pulling her little bed forward for him to
sit on, for there were only two wooden stools in the
hut, and no chair at all.
Then she took his sketching-easel and brushes
from his hand, and would have kneeled and taken
the dust off his boots if he would have let her; and
went hither and thither gladly and lightly, bringing him a wooden bowl of milk and the rest of the
slender fare, and cutting as quick as thought fresh
cresses and lettuce from her garden, and bringing
him, as the crown of all, Father Francis's honeycomb on vine-leaves, with some pretty sprays of
box and mignonette scattered about it - doing all
this with a swift, sweet grace that robbed the labor
of all look of servitude, and looking at him ever
and again with a smile that said as clearly as any
words, "I cannot do much, but what I do, I do
with all my heart."
There was something in the sight of her going
and coming in those simple household errands,
across the sunlit floor, that moved him as some
mountain air sung on an alp by a girl driving her
cows to pasture may move a listener who indiffer



TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


141


ent has heard the swell of the organ of La Hague,
or the recitative of a great singer in San Carlo.
The gray lavender blowing at the house-door
has its charm for those who are tired of the
camellias that float in the porcelain bowls of midnight suppers.
This man was not good. He was idle and vain,
and amorous and cold, and had been spoiled by
the world in which he had passed his days; but
he had the temper of an artist; he had something,
too, of a poet's fancy; he was vaguely touched
and won by this simple soul that looked at him
out of Bebee's eyes with some look that in all its
simplicity had a divine gleam in it that made him
half ashamed.
He had known women by the thousand, good
women and bad; women whom he had dealt ill
with and women who had dealt ill with him; but
this he had not known —this frank, fearless, tender, gay, grave, innocent, industrious little life,
helping itself, feeding itself, defending itself, working for itself and for others, and vaguely seeking
all the while some unseen light, some unknown
god, with a blind faith so infinitely ignorant and
yet so infinitely pathetic.
"All the people are gone on a pilgrimage," she
explained to him when he asked her why her
village was so silent this bright morning. "They
are gone to pray for a fine harvest, and then each
one prays for some other little thing that she
wants herself as well-it costs seven francs apiece.




142


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


They take their food with them; they go and
laugh and eat in the fields. I think it is nonsense.
One can say one's prayers just as well here. Mere
Krebs thinks so too, but then she says,' If I do
not go, it will look ill; people will say I am irreligious; and as we make so much by flour, God
would think it odd for me to be absent; and, besides, it is only seven francs there and back; and.
if it does please Ieaven, that is cheap, you know.
One will get it over and over again in Paradise.'
That is what Mere Krebs says. But, for me, I
think it is nonsense. It cannot please God to go
by train and eat galette and waste a whole day in
getting dusty.
"< When I give the Virgin my cactus flower, I do
give up a thing I love, and I let it wither on her
altar instead of pleasing me in bloom here all the
week, and then, of course, she sees that I have
done it out of gratitude. But that is different:
that I am sorry to do, and yet I am glad to do it
out of love. Do you not know?"
"Yes, I know very well. But is the Virgin all
that you love like this?"
"No; there is the garden, and there is Antoine
-he is dead, I know. But I think that we should
love the dead all the better, not the less, because
they cannot speak or say that they are angry; and
perhaps one pains them very much when one neglects them, and if they are ever so sad, they cannot
rise and rebuke one-that is why I would rather
forget the flowers for the Church than I would the




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SIOES.


143


flowers for his grave, because God can punish me,
of course, if he like, but Antoine never can-any
more-n ow.".
"You are logical in your sentiment, my dear,"
said Flamen, who was more moved than he cared
to feel. "The union is a rare one in your sex.
Who taught you to reason?"
"No one. And I do not know what to be
logical means. Is it that you laugh at me?"
"No. I do not laugh. And your pilgrimsthey are gone for all day?"
"Yes. They are gone to the Sacred IIeart at
St. Marie en Bois.  It is on the way to Liege.
They will come back at night-fall. And some of
them will be sure to have drunk too much, and
the children will get so cross. Prosper Bar, who
is a Calvinist, always says,' Do not mix up prayer
and play; you would not cut a gherkin in your
honey;' but I do not know why he called prayer a
gherkin, because it is sweet enough-sweeter than
anything, I think. When I pray to the Virgin to
let me see you next day, I go to bed quite happy,
because she will do it, I know, if it will be good
for me."
"But if it were not good for you, Bebebe?
Would you cease to wish it then?"
lie rose as he spoke, and went across the floor
and drew away her hand that was parting the flax,
and took it in his own and stroked it, indulgently
and carelessly, as a man may stroke the soft fur of
a young cat.




144


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


Leaning against the little lattice and looking
down on her with musing eyes, half smiling, half
serious, half amorous, half sad, Bebee looked up
with a sudden and delicious terror that ran through
her as the charm of the snake's gaze runs through
the bewildered bird.
" Would you cease to wish if it were not good?"
he asked again.
Bebee's face grew pale and troubled. She left
her hand in his because she did not think any
shame of. his taking it. But the question suddenly flung the perplexity and darkness of doubt
into the clearness of her pure child's conscience.
All her ways had been straight and sunlit before
her.
She had never had a divided duty.
The religion and the pleasure of her simple little
life had always gone hand-in-hand, greeting one
another, and never for an instant in conflict. In
any hesitation of her own she had always gone to
Father Francis, and he had disentangled the web
for her and made all plain.
But here was a difficulty in which she could
never go to Father Francis.
Right and wrong, duty and desire, were for the
first time arrayed before her in their ghastly and
unending warfare.
It frightened her with a certain breathless sense
of peril-the peril of a time when in lieu of that
gentle Mother of Roses whom she kneeled to
among the flowers, she would only see a dusky




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


145


shadow looming between her and the beauty of
life and the light of the sun.
What he said was quite vague to her. She attached no definite danger to his words. She only
thought-to see him was so great a joy-if Mary
forbade it, would she not take it if she could notwithstanding, always, always, always?
IIe kept her hand in his, and watched with contenitment the changing play of the shade and
sorrow, the fear and fascination, on her face.
"You do not know, Bebee?" lie said at length,
knowing well himself; so much better than ever
she knew. "Well, dear-that is not flattering to
me. But it is natural. The good Virgin of course
gives you all you have, food, and clothes, and your
garden, and your pretty plump chickens-and I am
only a stranger. You could not offend her for me
-tliat is not likely."
The child was cut to the heart by the sadness
and humility of words of whose studied artifice she
had no suspicion.
She thought that she seemed to him ungrateful
and selfish, and yet all the mooring-ropes that held
her little boat of life to the harbor of its simple
religion seemed cut away, and she seemed drifting
helpless and rudderless upon an unknown sea.
"I never did do wrong-that I know," she said
timidly, and lifted her eyes to his with an unconscious appeal in them.
"But-I do not see why it should be wrong to
speak with you. You are good, and you lend me
18                K




146


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


beautiful things out of other men's minds that will
make me less ignorant: Our Lady could not be
angry with that-she must like it."
" Our Lady?-oh, poor little simpleton!-where
will her reign be when Ignorance has once been
cut down, root and branch?" he thought to hirmself; but he only answered,"But whether she like it or not, Bel)ee?-you
beg the question, my dear; you are-you are not
so franlk as usual-think, and tell me honestly?"
lie knew quite well, but it amused him to see
the perplexed trouble that this, the first divided
duty of her short years, brought with it.
Bebee looked at him, and loosened her hand from
his, and sat quite still. Ier lips had a little quiver
in them.
"I think," she said at last, "I think-if it be
wrong, still I will wish it —es. Only I will not
tell myself it is right. I will just say to Our Lady,
'I am wicked, perhaps, but I cannot help it.' So
-I will not deceive her at all; and perhaps in time
she may forgive. But I think you only say it to
try me. It cannot, I am sure, be wrong-any more
than it is to talk to Jeannot or to Bac."
IIe had driven her into the subtleties of doubt,
but the honest little soul ill her found a way out,
as a flower in a cellar finds its way through the
stones to light.
Hie plucked the ivy-leaves and threw them at the
chickens on the bricks without, with a certain irnpatience in the action. The simplicity and the




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


147


directness of the answer disarmed him; he was
almost ashamed to use against her the weapons of
his habitual warfare. It was like a maitre d'armes
fencing with bare steel against a little naked child
armed with a blest palm-sheaf:
When she had thus brought him all she had, and
he to please her had sat down to the simple food,
she gathered a spray of roses and set it inl a pot
beside him, then left him and went and stood at a
little distance, waiting, with her hands lightly
crossed on her chest, to see if t.here were anything
that he might want.
lie ate and drank well to please her, looking at
her often as he did so.
"I break your bread, Bebee," he said, with a
tone that seemed strange to her. "I break your
bread. I must keep Arab faith with you."
"What is that?"
"I mean-I must never betray you."
"Betray me!   low could you?"
" Well-hurt you in any way."
" Ah, I an sure you would never do that."
IIe was silent, and looked at the spray of roses.
"Sit down and spin," he said impatiently. "I
am ashamed to see you stand there, and a woman
never looks so well as when she spins. Sit down
-and I will eat the good things you have brought
me. But I cannot if you stand and look."
"I beg your pardon, I did not know," she said,
ashamed.lest she should have seemed rude to him;
and she drew out her wheel under the light of the




148


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


lattice, and sat down to it, and began to disentangle
the threads.
It was a pretty picture-the low, square casement; the fiame of ivy, the pink and white of the
climbing sweet-peas; the girl's head; the cool, wet
leaves; the old wooden spinning-wheel, that purred
like a sleepy cat.
" I want to paint you as Gretchen, only it will be
a shame," he said.
"Who is Gretchen?"
" You shall read of her by-and-by. And you live
here all by yourself?"
"Since Antoine died-yes."
"And are never dull?"
"I have no time, and I do not think I would be
if I had time-there is so much to think of, and
one never can understand."
"But you must be very brave and laborious to
do all your work yourself. Is it possible a child
like you can spin, and wash, and bake, and garden,
and do everything?"
"Oh, many do more than I. Babette's eldest
daughter is only twelve, and she does much more,
because she has all the children to look after; and
they are very, very poor; they often have nothing
but a stew of nettles and perhaps a few snails, days
together."
"That is lean, bare, ugly, gruesome poverty;
there is plenty of that everywhere. But you,
Bebee-you are an idyll."
Bebee looked across the hut and smiled, and




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHIOES.


149


broke her thread. She did not know what he
meant, but if she were anything that pleased him,
it was well.
"Who were those beautiful women?" she said
suddenly, the color mounting into her cheeks.
"What women, my dear?"
"Those I saw at the window with you, the other
night-they had jewels."
"Oh!-women, tiresome enough; if I had seen
you, I would have dropped you some fruit. Poor
little Bebee! Did you go by, and I never knew?"
"You were laughing    "
"Was I?"
"Yes, and they were beautiful."
"In their own eyes; not in mine."
" No?"
She stopped her spinning and gazed at him with
wistful, wondering eyes. Could it be that they were
not beautiful to him? those deep red, glowing, sunbasked dahlia flowers?
" Do you know," she said very softly, with a flush
of penitence that came and went, " when I saw
them, I hated them; I confessed it to Father Francis next day. You seemed so content with them,
and they looked so gay and glad there-and then
the jewels! Somehow, I seemed to myself such a
little thing, and so ugly and mean. And yet, do
you know ---"
"And yet-well?"
" They did not look to me good-those women,"
said Bebbe thoughtfully, looking across at him in
13*




150


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


deprecation of his possible anger. "They wer
great people, I suppose, ana they appeared very
happy; but though I seemed nothing to myself
after them, still I think I would not change."
"You are wise without books, Bebee."
"Oh, no-I am not wise at all. I only feel. And
give me books; oh, pray, give me books! You do
not know; I will learn so tast-and I will not neglect anything, that I promise. The neighbors and
Jeannot say that I shall let the flowers die, and the
hut get dirty, and never spin or prick Annemie's
patterns; but that is untrue. I will do all, just as
I have done, and more too, if only you will give
me things to read, for I do think when one is happy,
one ought to work more-not less."
"But will these books make you happy? If you
ask me the truth, I must tell you-no. You are
happy as you are, because you know nothing else
than your own little life; for ignorance is happiness,
Beel)e, let sages, ancient and modern, say what they
will. But when you know a little, you will want to
know more; and when you know much you will
want to see much also, and then-and then-the
thing will grow-you will be no longer content.
That is, you will be unhappy."
Bebee watched him with wistful eyes.
" Perhaps that it is true. No doubt it is true, if
you say it. But you know all the world seems full
of voices that I hear, but that I cannot understand;
it is with me as I should think it is with people who
go to foreign countries and do not know the tongue




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


151


that is spoken when they land; and it makes me
unhappy, because I cannot comprehend, and so the
books will not make me more so, but less. And
as for being content-when I thought you were
gone away out of the city, last night, I thought I
would never be able to pray any more, because I
hated myself, and I almost hated the angels, and I
told Mary that she was cruel, and she turned her
face from me-as it seemed, forever."
She spoke quite quietly and simply, spinning as
she spoke, and looking across at him with earnest
eyes, that begged him to believe her.  She was
saying the pure truth, but she did not know the
force or the meaning of that truth.
IIe listened with a smile; it was not new to
him; he knew her heart much better than she
knew it herself, but there was an unconsciousness,
and yet a strength, in the words that touched him
though.
He threw the leaves away, irritably, and told her
to leave off her spinning.
"Some day I shall paint you with that wheel
as I painted the Broodhuis. Will you let me,
Bebee?"
" Yes."
She answered him as she would have answered
if he had told her to go on pilgrimage from one
end of the Low Countries to the other.
" What were you going to do to-day?"
"I am going into the market with the flowers;
I go every day."




152


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


"How much will you make?"
"Two or three francs, if I am lucky."
"And do you never have a holiday?"
"Oh, yes; but not often, you know, because it
is on the fete days that the people want the most
flowers."
"But in the winter?"
"Then I work at the lace."
"Do you never go into the woods?"
"I have been, once or twice; but it loses a
whole day."
"You are afraid of not earning?"
"Yes.   Because I am afraid of owing people
anything."
"Well, give up this one day, and we will make
holiday. The people are out; they will not know.
Come into the forest, and we will dine at a caf6 in
the woods; and we will be as poetic as you like,
and I will tell you a tale of one called Rosalind,
who pranked herself in boy's attire, all for love, in
the Ardennes country yonder.  Come, it is the
very day for the forest; it will make me a lad
again at Meudon, when the lilacs were in bloom.
Poor Paris! Come."
"Do you mean it?"
The color was bright in her face, her heart was
dancing, her little feet felt themselves already on
the fresh green turf.
She had no thought that there could be any
harm in it. She would have gone with Jeannot or
old Bac.




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


153


" Of course I mean it. Come. I was going to
Mayence to see the Magi and Van Dyck's Christ.
We will go to Soignies instead, and study green
leaves. I will paint your face by sunlight. It is
the best way to paint you. You belong to the
open air. So should Gretchen; or how else should
she have the blue sky in her eyes?"
" But I have only wooden shoes!"
1Her face was scarlet as she glanced at her feet;
he who had wansted to give her the silk stockingshow would he like to be seen walking abroad with
those two clumsy, clattering, work-a-day, little
sabots?
" Never mind. My dear, in my time I have had
enough of satin shoes and of silver gilt heels; they
click-clack as loud as yours, and cost much more
to those who walk with them, not to mention that
they will seldom deign to walk at all. Your
wooden shoes are picturesque. Paganini made a
violin out of a wooden shoe. Who knows what
music may lurk in yours, only you have never
heard it. Perhaps I have. It was Bac who gave
you the red shoes that was the barbarian, not I.
Come."
"You really mean it?"
" Come."
"But they will miss me at market."
"They will think you are gone on the pilgrimage: you need never tell them you have
not."
"But if they ask me?"




154


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


"Does it never happen that you say any other
thing than the truth?"
"Any other thing than the truth! Of course
not. People take for granted that one tells truth;
it would be very base to cheat them. Do you really
mean that I may come?-in the forest!-and you
will tell me stories like those you give me to
read?"
"I will tell you a better story. Lock your hut,
Bebee, and come."
"And to think you are not ashamed!"
Ashamed?"
"Yes, because of my wooden shoes."
Was it possible? Be61ee thought, as she ran out
into the garden and locked the door behind her,
and pushed the key under the water-butt as usual,
being quite content with that prudent precaution
against robbers which had served Antoine all his
days. Was it possible, this wonderful joy?-her
cheeks were like her roses, her eyes had a brilliance
like the sun; the natural grace and mirth of the
child blossomed in a thousand ways and gestures.
As she went by the shrine in the wall, she bent
her knee a moment and made the sign of the cross;
then she gathered a little moss-rose that nodded
close under the border of the palisade, and turned
and gave it to him.
"Look, she sends you this. She is not angry,
you see, and it is much more pleasure when she is
pleased-do you not know?"




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.      155
IIe shrank a little as her fingers touched him.
" What a pity you had no mother, Bebee!" he
said, on an inmpulse of emotion, of which in Paris
he would have been more ashamed than of any
guilt.




CHAPTER XV.
|N the' deserted lane by the swans' water,
under the willows, the horses waited to
take him to Mechlin; little, quick, rough
horses, with round brass bells, in the Flenish fashion, and gay harness, and a low char-A-banc, in
which a wolf-skin and red rugs, and all a painter's
many necessities, were tossed together.
He lifted her in, and the little horses flew fast
through the green country, ringing chimes at each
step, till they plunged into the deep glades of the
woods of Cambre and Soignies.
Bebee sat breathless with delight.
She had never gone behind horses in all her life,
except once or twice in a wagon when the tired
teamsters had dragged a load of corn across the
plains, or when the miller's old gray mare had hobbled wearily before a cart-load of noisy, happy, mischievous children going home from the masses and
fairs, and flags, and flowers, and church banners,
and puppet-shows, and lighted altars, and whirlinlg
merry-go-rounds of the Fete Dieu.
She had never known what it was to sail as on the
wings of the wind along broad roads, with yellow
166




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


157


wheat-lands, and green hedges, and wayside trees,
and little villages, and reedy canal-water, all flying
by lier to the sing-song of the joyous bells.
" Oh, how good it is to live!" she cried, clapping
her hands in a very ecstasy, as the clear morning
broadened into gold and the west wind rose and
blew from the sands by the sea.
"Yes-it is good-if one did not tire so soon,"
said he, watching her with a listless pleasure.
But she did not hear; she was beyond the reach
of any power to sadden her; she was watching the
white oxen that stood on the purple brow of the
just reapen lands, and the rosy clouds that blew
like a shower of apple-blossoms across the sky to
the south.
There was a sad darkling Calvary on the edge of
'the harvest-field that looked black against the blue
sky; its shadow fell across the road, but she did
not see it: she was looking at the sun.
There is not much change in the great Soignies
woods. They are aisles on aisles of beautiful green
trees, crossing and recrossing; tunnels of dark
foliage that look endless; long avenues of beech,
of oak, of elm, or of fir, with the bracken and the
brushwood growing dense between; a delicious
forest-growth everywhere, shady even at noon, and
by a little past midday dusky as evening; with the
forest fragrance, sweet and dewy, all about, and
under the fern the stirring of wild game, and the
white gleam of little rabbits, and the sound of the
wings of birds.
14




158


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


Soignies is not legend-haunted like the Black
Forest, nor king-haunted like Fontainebleau, nor
sovereign of two historic streams like the brave
woods of Ieidelberg; nor wild and romantic, and
broken with black rocks, and poetized by the shade
of Jaques, and swept through by a perfect river,
like its neighbors of Ard.(elnes; nor throned aloft
on mighlty mountains like the majestic oak-glades
of the Swabian hills of the ivory-carvers.
Soignies is only a Flemish forest in a plain,
throwing its shadow over corn-fields and cattle
pastures, with no panorama beyond it and no wonders in its depth. But it is a fresh, bold, beautiful
forest for all that.
It has only green leaves to give -green leaves
always, league after league; but there is about it
that vague mystery which all forests have, and
this universe of leaves seems boundless, and Pan
might dwell in it, and St. Iubert, and John Keats.
B3ebee, in her rare holidays with the Bac children or with Jeannot's sisters, had never penetrated farther than the glades of the Cambre, and
had never entered the heart of the true forest,
which is much still what it must have been in the
old days when the burghers of Brabant cut their
yew bows and their pike-staves from it to use
against the hosts of Spain.
To Bebee it was as an enchanted land, and every
play of light and shade, every hare speeding across
the paths, every thrush singing in the leaves, every
little dog-rose or harebell that blossomed in the




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


159


thickets, was to her a treasure, a picture, a poem,
a delight.
Ile had seen girls thus in the woods of Vincennles and of Versailles in the student days of
his youth; little work-girls fiesh from chalets of
the Jura or from vile-hung huts of the Loire,
who had brought their poor little charms to.perish
in Paris; and who dwelt under the hot tiles and
amidst the gilded shop signs till they were as pale
and thin as their own starved balsams; and who,
when they saw the greenl woods, laughed and
cried a little, and thouglt of the broad sun-swept
fiel(ls, and wished tlat they were back again behind their drove of cows, or weeding among the
green grapes.
But those little work-girls had been mere homely
daisies, and daisies already with the dust of the
pavement and of the dancing-gardens upon them.
Bebee was as pure and fresh as these dew-wet
dog-roses that she founld in thle thickets of thorn.
lie had meant to treat her as he had used to do
those work-girls-a little wine, a little wooing, a
little folly and passion, idle as a butterfly and brief
as a rainbow —one nidsummer day and nightthen a handful of gold, a caress, a good-morrow,
and forgetful ness ever afterwards-that was what
he had meant when he had brought her out to the
forest of Soignies.
But-she was different, this child.
IIe made the great sketch of her for his Gretchen, sitting on a moss-ground trunk, with mar



160


TWVO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


guerites in her hand; he sent for their breakfast
far into the woods, and saw her set her pearly teeth
into early peaches and costly sweatmeats; he wandered with her hither and thither, and told her
tales out of the poets and talked to her in the
dreamy, cynical, poetical manner that was characteristic of him, being half artificial and half sorrowful, as his temper was.
But Bebe'e-all unconscious, intoxicated with
happiness, and yet touched by it into that vague
sadness which the summer sun brings with it even
to young things, if they have soul in them;B1ebee said to him what the work-girls of Paris
never had done.
Beautiful things: things fantastic, ignorant, absurd, very simple, very unreasonable oftentimes,
but things beautiful always, and sometimes even
very wise by a wisdom not of the world; by a
certain light divine that does shine now and then
as through an alabaster lamp, through minds that
have no grossness to obscure them.
Her words were not equal to the burden of her
thoughts at times, but he knew how to take the
pearl of the thought from the broken shell and
tangled sea-weed of her simple, untutored speech.
"If there be a God anywhere," he thought to
himself, " this little Fleming is very near him."
She was so near that although he had no belief
in any God, he could not deal with her as he had
used to do with the work-girls in the primrose
paths of old Vincennes.




CIIAPTER      XVI.
0 be Gretchen, you must count the leaves
of your daisies," he said to her, as he
painted-painted her just as she was,
with her two little wlite feet in the wooden shoes,
and the thick, green leaves behind; the simplest
picture possible, the dress of gray-only cool dark
gray-with white linen bodice, and no color anywhere except in the green of the foliage; but where
he meant thle wonder and the charm of it to lie was
in the upraised, serious, child-like face, and the gaze
of the grave, smiling eyes.
It was Gretclenl, spillning, out in the open air
among the flowers. Gretchen, with the tall dogdaisies growing up about her feet, among the thyme
and the roses, before she had had need to gather
one to ask her future of its parted leaves.
The Gretchenl of Schefter tells no tale; she is a
fair-haired, hard-working, simple-minded peasant,
with whom neither angels Ior devils have anything
to do, and whose eyes never can open to either hell
or heaven. But the Gretchen of Flamen said much
more than this: looking at it, men would sigh from
shame, and women weep from sorrow.
14*              L          *    161




162


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


"Count the daisies?" echoed Bebee.  "Oh, 1
know what you mean. A little-much-passion
ately-until death-not at all. What the girls say
when they want to see if any one loves them? Is
that it?"
She looked at him without any consciousnessexcept as she loved the flowers.
"Do you think the daisies know?" she went on,
seriously, parting their petals with her fingers.
"Flowers do know many things-that is certain."
"Ask them for yourself."
"Ask them what?"
"IIow much-any one-loves you?"
"Oh, but every one loves me; there is no one
that is bad. Antoine used to say to me, 'Never
think of yourself, Bebee; always think of other
people, so every one will love you.' And I always
try to do that, and every one does."
" But that is not the love the daisy tells of to your
sex."
"No?"
"No; the girls that you see count the flowersthey are thinking, not of all the village, but of
some one unlike all the rest, whose shadow falls
across theirs in the moonlight! You know that?"
"Ah, yes-and they marry afterwards-yes."
She said it softly, musingly, with no embarrassment; it was an unreal, remote thing to her, and
yet it stirred her heart a little with a vague trouble
that was infinitely sweet.
There is little talk of love in the lives of the
~*




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


163


poor; they have no space for it; love to them
means more mouths to feed, more wooden shoes
to buy, more hands to dive into the meagre bag
of coppers. Now and then a girl of the commune
had been married, and had gone out just the same
the next day to her plowing in the fields or to
her lace-weaving in the city. Bebee had thought
little of it.
" They marry or they do not marry. That is as
it may be," said Flamen, with a smile. "Bebee,
I must paint you as Gretchen before she made a
love-dial of the daisies. What is the story? Oh,
I have told you stories enough. Gretchen's you
would not understand, just yet."
" But what did the daisies say to her?"
"My dear, the daisies always say the same
thing, because daisies always tell the truth and
know men. The daisies always say'a little;' it
is the girl's ear that tricks her, and makes her
hear' till death,'-a folly and falsehood of which
the daisy is not guilty."
"But who says it if the daisy do not?"
"Ah, the devil perhaps-who knows? He has
so much to do in these things."
But Bebee did not smile; she had a look of
horror il her blue eyes; she belonged to a peasantry who believed in exorcising the fiend by the
aid of the cross, and who not so very many generations before had driven him out of human bodies
by rack and flame.
She looked with a little wistful fear on the




164


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


white, golden-eyed marguerites that lay on her
lap.
"Do you think the fiend is in these?" she whispered, with awe in her voice.
Flamen smiled. "When you count them     he
will be there, no doubt."
Bebee threw them with a shudder on the grass.
"IIave I spoilt your holiday, dear?" he said,
with a certain self-reproach.
She was silent a minute, then she gathered up
the daisies again, and stroked them and put them
to her lips.
"It is not they that do wrong. You say the
girls' ears deceive them. It is the girls who want
a lie and will not believe a truth because it humbles them; it is the girls that are to blame, not
the daisies. As for me, I will not ask the daisies
anything ever, so the fiend will not enter into
them."
"Nor into you. Poor little Bebe'e!"
"Why, you pity me for that?"
" Yes. Because, if women never see the serpent's
face, neither do they ever scent the smell of the
paradise roses; and it will be hard for you to die
without a single rose d'amour in your pretty breast,
poor little Bebee?"
"I do not understand. But you frighten me a
little."
IHe rose and left his easel and threw himself at
her feet on the grass; he took the little wooden
shoes in his hands as reverently as he would have




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


165


taken the broidered shoes of a duchess; he looked
up at her with tender, smiling eyes.
"Poor little Bebee!" he said again.  "Did I
fiighten you indeed? Nay, that was very base of
me. We will not spoil our summer holiday. There
is no such thing as a fiend, my dear. There are
only men-such as I am. Say the daisy spell over
for me, Bebee. See if I do not love you a little,
just as you love your flowers."
She smiled, and the happy laughter came again
over her face.
"Oh, I am sure you care for me a little," she
said, softly, "or you would not be so good and get
me books and give me pleasure; and I do not want
the daisies to tell me that, because you say it yourself, which is better."
" Much better," he answered her dreamily, and
lay there in the grass, holding the little wooden
shoes in his hands.
He was not in love with her. HIe was in no
haste. Ile preferred to play with her softly, slowly,
as one separates the leaves of a rose, to see the deep
rose of its heart.
HIer own ignorance of what she felt had a charm
for him. He liked to lift the veil from her eyes by
gentle degrees, watching each new pulse-beat, each
fresh instinct tremble into life.
It was an old, old story to him; he knew each
chapter and verse to weariness, though there still
was no other story that he still read as often. But
to her it was so new.




166


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


To him it was a long beaten track; he knew
every turn of it; he recognized every wayside blossom; he had passed over a thousand times each
tremulous bridge; lie knew so well beforehand
where each shadow would fall, and where each
fresh bud would blossom, and where each harvest
would be reaped.
But to her it was so new.
She followed him as a blind child a man that
guides her through a garden and reads her a wonder
tale.
He was good to her, that was all she knew.
When he touched her ever so lightly she felt a
happiness so perfect, and yet so unintelligible, that
she could have wished to die in it.
And in her humility and her ignorance she wondered always how he-so great, so wise, so beautiful-could have thought it ever worth his while to
leave the paradise of Rubes' land to wait with her
under her little rush-thatched roof, and bring her
here to see the green leaves and the living things
of the forest.
As they went, a man was going under the trees
with a load of wood upon his back. Bebee gave a
little cry of recognition.
"Oh, look, that is Jeannot! Iow he will wonder to see me here!"
Flamen drew her a little downward, so that the
forester passed onward without perceiving them.
"Why do you do that?" said Bebee. "Shall I
not speak to him?"




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


167


"Why? To have all your neighbors chatter of
your feast in the forest? It is not worth while."
"Ah, but I always tell them everything," said
Be)bee, whose imagination had been already busy
with the wonders that she would unfold to Mere
Krebs and the Varnhart children.
" Then you will see but little of me, my dear.
Learn to be silent, Bebee. It is a woman's first
duty, though her hardest."
"Is it?"
She did not speak for some time. She could
not imagine a state of things in which she would
not narrate the little daily miracles of her life to
the good old garrulous women and the little openmouthed romps. And yet-she lifted her eyes to
his.
"I am glad you have told me that," she said.
"Though indeed, I do not see why one should not
say what one does, yet-somehow-I do not like
to talk about you. It is like the pictures in the
galleries, and the music in the cathedral, and the
great still evenings, when the fields are all silent,
and it is as if Christ walked abroad in them;-I
do lnot know how to talk of those things to the
others-only to you-and I do not like to talk
about you to them-do you not know?"
" Yes, I know. But what affinity have I, Bebee,
to your thoughts of your God walking in Iis cornfields?"
Bebee's eyes glanced down through the green
aisle of the forests, with the musing seriousness in




168


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


them that was like the child-angels of Botticelli's
dreams.
"I cannot tell you very well. But when I am
in the fields at evening and think of Christ, I feel
so happy, and of such good will to all the rest,
and I seem to see heaven quite plain through the
beautiful gray air where the stars are-and so I
feel when I am with you-that is all. Only-  "
"Only what?"
"Only in those evenings, when I was all alone,
heaven seemed up there, where the stars are, and
I longed for wings; but now, it is here —and I
would only shut my wings if I had them, and not
stir."
IIe looked at her, and took her hands and kissed
them-but reverently-as a believer may kiss a
shrine. In that moment to Flamen she was sacred;
in that moment he could no more have hurt her
with passion than he could have hurt her with a
blow.
It was an emotion with him, and did not endure.
But whilst it lasted, it was true.




CIAPTER       XVII.
IIEN he took her to dine at one of the
wooden cafes under the trees. There was
a little sheet of water in front of it, and a
gay garden around.  There was a balcony and a
wooden stairway; there were long trellised arbors,
and little white tables, and great rose-bushes, like
ler own at home. They had an arbor all to themselves; a cool sweet-smelling bower of green, with
a glimpse of scarlet from the flowers of some twisting beans.
They had a meal, the like of which she had
never seen; such a huge melon in the centre of it,
and curious wines, and coffee or cream in silver
pots, or what looked like silver to her-" just like
the altar-vases in the church," she said to herself.
"If only the Varnhart children were here!" she
cried; but he did not echo the wish.
It was just sunset. There was a golden glow on
the little bit of water.  On the other side of the
garden some one was playing a guitar.  Under
a lime-tree some girls were swinging, crying
Higher ighergher! at each toss.
In a longer avenue of trellised green, at a long
15                               169




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


table, there was a noisy party of students and girls
of the city; their laughter was mellowed by distance as it came over the breadth of the garden,
and they sang, with fresh shrill Flemish voices,
songs from an opera-bouffe of La Monnaie.
It was all pretty, and gay, and pleasant.
There was everywhere about an air of lighthearted enjoyment.  I6b6e sat with a wondering
look in her wide-opened eyes, and all the naturlal
instincts of her youth, that were like curled-up
friuit-buds in her, unclosed softly to the light of
joy.
"Is life always like this in your Rubes' land?"
she asked him; that vague far-away country of
which she never asked him anything more definite,
and which yet was so clear before her fancy.
" Yes," he ma(le aiswer to her. "Only-instead
of thlose leaves, flowers and ponlegranlates; and in
lieu of tlat tilnkling guitar, a voice whose notes are
esteemled like king's jewels; and in place of those
little green arbors, great white palaces, cool aid
still, with ilex woods and orange groves and sapphire seas beyond them. Would you like to corme
there, Bebee?-and wear laces such as you weave,
and hear singing and laughter all night long, and
never work any more in the mould of the garden,
or spil any more at that tiresome wheel, or go any
more out in the wind, and the rain, and the winter
mud to the market?"
Bebee listelled, leaning her round elbows on
the table, and her warm cheeks on her hands, as




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


171


a child gravely listens to a fairy story. But the
sumptuous picture, and the sensuous phrase he had
chosen, passed by her.
It is of no use to tempt the little chaffinch of the
woods with a ruby instead of a cherry. The bird
is made to feed on the brown berries, on the morning dews, on the scarlet hips of roses, and the
blossoms of the wind-tossed pear-boughs; the gem,
though it be a monarch's, will only strike hard and
tasteless on its beak.
"I would like to see it all," said Bebee, musingly
trying to follow out her thoughts. " But as for the
garden-work and the spinning-that I do not want
to leave, because I have done it all my life; and I
do not think I should care to wear lace-it would
tear very soon; one would be afraid to run; and
do you see I know how it is made-all that lace.
I know how blind the eyes get over it, and how the
hearts ache; I know how the old women starve,
and the little children cry; I know that there is
not a sprig of it that is not stitched with pain; the
great ladies do not think, I dare say, because they
have never worked at it or watched the others;
but I have. And so, you see, I think if I wore
it I should feel sad, and if a nail caught on it I
should feel as if it were tearing the flesh of my
friends. Perhaps I say it badly-but that is what I
feel."
"You do not say it badly-you speak well, for
you speak from the heart," he answered her, and
felt a tinge of shame that he had tempted her with




172


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


the gold and purple of a baser world than any that
she knew.
"And yet you want to see new lands?" he pursued. " What is it you want to see there?"
"Ah, quite other things than these," cried Bebee,
still leaning her cheeks on her hands. " That
dancing and singing is very pretty and merry, but
it is just as good when old Claude fiddles and the
children skip. This wine, you tell me, is something very great-but fresh milk is much nicer, I
think. It is not these kind of things I want-I
want to know all about the people who lived before
us; I want to know what the stars are, and what
the wind is; I want to know where the lark goes
when you lose him out of sight against the sun;
I want to know how the old artists got to see God,
that they could paint him and all his angels as they
have done; I want to know how the voices got into
the bells, and how they can make one's heart beat,
hanging up there as they do, all alone among the
jackdaws; I want to know what it is when I walk
in the fields in the morning, and it is all gray and
soft and still, and the corn-crake cries in the
wheat, and the little mice run home to their holes,
that makes me so glad and yet so sorrowful, as if
I were so very near God, and yet so all alone, and
such a little thing; because you see the mouse
she has her hole, and the crake her own people,
but I" —
Ier voice faltered a little and stopped: she had
never before thought out into words her own lone



TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


173


liness; from the long green arbor the voices of the
girls and the students sang" Ah! le doux son d'un baiser tendre I"
Flamen was silent. The poet in him-and in
an artist there is always more or less of the poetkept him back from ridicule, nay, moved him to
pity and respect.
They were absurdly simple words no doubt, had
little wisdom in them, and were quite childish in
their utterance, and yet they moved him curiously
as a man very base and callous may at times be
moved by the look in a dying deer's eyes, or by the
sound of a song that some lost love once sang.
lie rose and drew her hands away, and took her
small face between his own hands instead.
"Poor little Be'be!" he said gently, looking
down on her with a breath that was almost a sigh.
"Poor little B3bee!-to envy the corn-crake and
the mouse!"
She was a little startled; her cheeks grew very
warm under his touch, but her eyes looked still
into his without fear.
IIe stooped and touched her forehead with his
lips, gently and without passion, almost reverently;
she grew rose-hued as the bright bean-flowers, up
to the light gold ripples of her hair; she trembled
a little and drew back, but she was not alarmed
nor yet ashamed; she was too simple of heart to
feel the fear that is born of passion and of consciousness.
15*




174


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


It was as Jeantiot kissed his sister Marie, who
was fifteen years old and sold milk for the Krebs
people in the villages with a little green cart and
a yellow dog-no more.
And yet the sunny arbor leaves and the glimpse
of the blue sky swam round her indistinctly, and
the sounds of the guitar grew dull upon her ear
and were lost as in a rushing hiss of water, because
of the great sudden unintelligible happiness that
seemed to bear her little life away on it as a sea
wave bears a young child off its feet.
"You do not feel alone now, Beb6e?" he whispered to her.
"No!" she answered him softly under her breath,
and sat still, while all her body quivered like a
leaf.
No; how could she ever be alone now that this
sweet, soft, unutterable touch would always be in
memory upon her; how could she wish ever again"
now to be the corn-crake in the summer corn or
the gray mouse in the hedge of hawthorn?
At that moment a student went by past the
entrance of the arbor; he had a sash round his
loins and a paper feather in his cap; he was playing a fife and dancing; he glanced in as he went.
"It is time to go home, Bebee," said Flamen.




CHAPTER      XVIII.
O it came to pass that Bebee's day in the
big forest came and went as simply almost
as any day that she had played away with
the Varnhart children under the beech shadows of
Cambre woods.
And when he took her to her hut at sunset before
the pilgrims had returned there was a great bewildered tumult of happiness in her heart, but
there was no memory with her that prevented her
from looking at the shrine in the wall as she passed
it, and saying with a quick gesture of the cross on
brow and bosom,"Ah, dear Holy Mother-how good you have
been! and I am back again, you see, and I will
work harder than ever because of all this joy that
you have given me."
And she took another moss-rose and changed it
for that of the morning, which was faded, and said
to Flamen," Look-she sends you this. Now do you know
what I mean? One is more content when She is
content."
He did not answer, but he held her hands
175




176


TWYO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


against him a moment as they fastened in the
rosebud.
"Not a word to the pilgrims, Bebee-you remember?"
" Yes, I will remember. I do not tell them every
time I pray-it will be like being silent about that
-it will be no more wrong than that."
But there was a touch ot anxiety in the words;
she was not quite certain; she wanted to be reassured. Instinct moved her not to speak of him:
but habit made it seem wrong to her to have any
secret from tile people who had been about her
from her birth.
Ite did not reassure her; her anxiety was pretty
to watch, and he left the trouble in her heart like
a bee in the chalice of a lily. Besides, the little
wicket-gate was between them; he was musing
whether he would push it open once more.
Ier fate was in the balance, though she did not
dream it: he had dealt with her tenderly, honestly,
sacredly all that day-almost as much so as stupid
Jeannot could have done. He had been touched
by her trust in him, and by the unconscious beauty
of her fancies, into a mood that was unlike all his
life and habits. But after all, he said to himselfAfter all!Where he stood in the golden evening he saw
the rosy curled mouth, the soft troubled eyes, the
little brown hands that still tried to fasten the rosebud, the young peach-like skin where the wind
stirred the bodice;-she was only a little Flemish




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES


177


peasant, this poor little Bebee, a little thing of the
fields and the streets, for all the dreams of God
that abode with her. After all-soon or late-the
end would be always the same. What matter!
She would weep a little to-morrow, and she would
not kneel any more at the shrine in the garden
wall; and then-and then-she would stay here
and marry the good boor Jeannot, just the same
after awhile; or drift away after him to Paris, and
leave her two little wooden shoes, and her visions
of Christ in the fields at evening, behind her for.evermore, and do as all the others did, and take not
only silken stockings but the Cinderella slipper
that is called Gold, which brings all other good
things in its train;-what matter!
Ile had meant this from the first, because she
was so pretty, and those little wooden sabots ran
so lithely over the stones; though he was not in
love with her, but only idly stretched his hand for
her as a child by instinct stretches to a fruit that
hangs in the sun a little rosier and a little nearer
than the rest.
What matter-he said to himself-she loved him,
poor little soul, though she did not know it-and
there would always be Jeannot glad enough of a
handful of bright French gold.
I-e pushed the gate gently against her; her hands
fastened the rosebud and drew open the latch themselves.
"Will you come in a little?" she said, with the
happy light in her face. " You must not stay long,
M




178


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


because the flowers must be watered, and then
there are Annemie's patterns-they must be done
or she will have no money and so no food-but if
you would come in for a little? And see-if yo'u
wait a minute I will show you the roses that I shall
cut to-morrow the first thing, and take down to St.
Guido to Our Lady's altar in thank-offering for
to-day. I should like you to choose them-you
yourself-and if you would just touch them I should
feel as if you gave them to her too. Will you?"
She spoke with the pretty outspoken frankness
of her habitual speech, just tempered and broken
with the happy, timid hesitation, the curious sense
at once of closer nearness and of greater distance,
that had come on her since he had kissed her
among the briight bean-flowers.
IIe turned from her quickly.
"No, dear-no. Gather your roses alone, Bebee
-if I touch them their leaves will fall."
Then, with a hurriedly backward glance down
the dusky lane to see that none were looking, he
bent his head and kissed her again quickly and
with a sort of shame, and swung the gate behind
him and went away through the boughs and the
shadows.




CHAPTER       XIX.
EBEE looked after him wistfully till his
figllre was lost ill the gloom.
The village was very quiet; a dog barking afar off and a cow lowiing in the meadow were
the only living things that made their presence
heard; the pilgrims had not returned.
She leaned on the gate a few minutes in that indistinct, dreamy happiness which is the prerogative
of innmocent love.
"IHow wonderful it is that he should give a
thouglht to me!" she said again and again to herself. It was as if a king had stooped for a little
knot of daisied grass to set it in his crown where
the great diamonds should be.
She did not reason. She did not question. She
did not look beyond that hour-such is the privilege of youth.
"IIow I will read! How I will learn! How
wise I will try to be; and how good, if I call!"
she thought, swaying the little gate lightly under
her weiglit, and looking with glad eyes at the
goats as they fiisked with their young in the pasture on the other side of the big trees, whilst one
179




180


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


by one the stars came out, and an owl hooted from
the palace-woods, and the frogs croaked good-nights
in the rushes.
Then, like a little day-laborer as she was, with
the habit of toil and the need of the poor upon
her from her birth up, she shut down the latch of
the gate, kissed it where his hand had rested, and
went to the well to draw its nightly draught for the
dry garden.
" Oh, dear roses!" she said to them as she rained
the silvery showers over their nodding heads. " Oh,
dear roses!-tell me-was ever anybody so happy
as I am? Oh, if you say 'yes' I shall tell you
you lie; silly flowers that were only born yesterday!"
But the roses shook the water off them in the
wind, and said, as she wished them to say,"No-no one-ever before, Bebee-no one ever
before."
For roses, like everything else upon earth, only
speak what our own heart puts into them.
An old mall went past up the lane; old Jehan,
who was too ailing and aged to make one of the
pilgrimage. lie looked at the little quick-moving
form, grayish white ill the starlight, with the dark
copper vessel balanced on her head, going to and
fro betwixt the well and the garden.
"You did not go to the pilgrimage, poor little
one V! he said across the sweet-brier hedge. "Nay,
that was too bad; work, work, work-thy pretty
back should not be bent double yet. You want




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


181


a holiday, Bebee; well, the Fete Dieu is near.
Jeannot shall take you, and maybe I can find a
few sous for gingerbread and merry-go-rounds.
You sit dull in the market all day; you want a
feast."
Bebee colored behind the hedge, and ran in and
brought three new-laid eggs that she had left in the
flour-bin in the early morning, and thrust them on
him through a break in the brier. It was the first
time she had ever done anything of which she
might not speak; she was ashamed, and yet the
secret was so sweet to her.
"I am very happy, Jehan, thank God!" she
murmured, with a tremulous breath and a shine
in her eyes that the old man's ears and sight were
too dull to discern.
"' So was she," muttered Jehan, as he thrust the
eggs into his old patched blue blouse. "So was
she. And then a stumble-a blow in the lane
there-a horse's kick-and all was over. All over,
my pretty one-for ever and ever."


16




CIAPTER XX.
N a sudden impulse Flamen, going through
the woodland shadows to the city, paused
anld turned back; all his impulses were
quick, and swayed him now hither now thither in
many contrary ways.
IIe knew that the hour was come-that he must
leave her and spare her, as to himself he phrased
it, or teach her the love words that the daisies
whisper to women.
And why not?-any way she would marry
Jeannot.
lie, half-way to the town, walked back again and
paused a moment at the gate; an emotion half
pitiful, half cynical, stirred in him.
Anyway he would leave her in a few days; Paris
had again opened her arms to him; his old life
awaited him; women who claimed him by imperious amorous demands reproached him; ana after
all this day he had got the Gretchen of his ideal, a
great picture for the future of his fame.
As he would leave her anyway so soon, he would
leave ler unscathed-poor little ficld-flower —he
182




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


183


could never take it with him to blossom or wither
in Paris.
Iis world would laugh too utterly if he made for
himself a mistress out of a little Fleming in two
wooden shoes. BesidesBesides, something that was half weak and half
noble moved him not to lead this child, in her
trust and her ignorance, into ways that when she
awakened from her trance would seem to her
shameful and full of sorrow. For he knew that
Bebee was not as others are.
H-e turned back and knocked at the hut door and
opened it.
Bebee was just beginning to undress herself; she
had taken off her white kerchief and her wooden
shoes; her pretty shoulders and her little neck
shone wlhite in the moon; her feet were bare on
the mud floor.
She started with a cry and threw the handkerchief again on her shoulders, but there was no fear
of him; only the unconscious instinct of her girlhood.
IIe thought for a moment that he would not go
away until the morrow-.
"Did you want me?" said Bebee softly, with
happy eyes of surprise and yet a little startled,
fearing some evil might have happened to himr
that he should have returned thus.
"No; I do not want you, dear," he said gently;
no-he did not want her, poor little soul; she
wanted him, but he-there were so many of these




184


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


things in his life, and he liked her too well to love
her.
t"No, dear, I did not want you," said Flamen,
drawing her arms about him, and feeling her
flutter like a little bird, while the moonlight came
in through the green leaves and fell in fanciful
patterns on the floor. "But I came to say-you
have had one happy day, wholly happy, have you
not, poor little Bebe?"
"Ah, yes!" she sighed rather than said the answer in her wondrous gladness; drawn there close
to him, with the softness of his lips upon her.
Could he have come back only to ask that?
" Well, that is something. You will remember
it always, Bebee?" he murmured in his unconscious cruelty. "I did not wish to spoil your
cloudless pleasure, dear-for you care for me a
little, do you not?-so I came back to tell you
only now that I go away for a little while tomorrow."
" Go away!"
She trembled in his arms and turned cold as ice;
a great terror and darkness fell upon her; she had
never thought that he would ever go away. IHe
caressed her, and played with her as a boy ma3
with a bird before he wrings its neck.
"You will come back?"
ITe kissed her: —" Surely."
"To-morrow?"
"Nay-not so soon."
"In a week?"




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


" Iardly."
"Ill a month, then?"
"Perhaps."
"Before winter, anyway?"
IIe looked aside from the beseeching, tearful,
candid eyes, and kissed her hair and her throat,
and said, "Yes, dear-beyond a doubt.".
Sle clung to him, crying silently-he wished
that women would not weep.
" Come, Bebee, listen," he said coaxingly, thinking to break the bitterness to her. "This is not
wise, and it gives me pain. There is so much for
you to do. You know so little. There is so much
to learn. I will leave you many books, and you must
grow quite learned in my absence. The Virgin is
all very well in her way, but she cannot teach us
much, poor lady. For her kingdom is called Ignorance. You must teach yourself. I leave you that
to do. The days will go by quickly if you are laborious and patient. Do you love me, little one?"
For an answer she kissed his hand.
" You are a busy little Bebee always," he said,
with his lips caressing her soft brown arms that
were round his neck. "But you must be busier
than ever whilst I am gone. So you will forget.
No, no, I do not mean that:-I mean so the time
will pass quickest. Anld I shall finish your picture,
Bebee, and all Paris will see you, and the great
ladies will envy the little girl with her two wooden
shoes. Ah! that does not please you?-you care
for none of these vanities. No. Poor little Bebee,
16*




186


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


why did God make you, or Chance breathe life into
you? You are so far away from us all. It was cruel.
What harm has your poor little soul ever done that,
pure as a flower, it should have been sent to the
hell of this world?"
She clung to him, sobbing without sound. "You
will come back?   You will come back?" she
moaned, clasping him closer and closer.
Flamen's own eyes grew dim. But he lied to
her:-" I will-I promise."
It was so much easier to say so, and it would
break her sorrow. So he thought.
For the moment again he was tempted to take
her with him-but, he resisted it-he would tire,
and she would cling to him forever.
There was a long silence. The bleating of the
little kid in the shed without was the only sound;
the gray lavender blew to and fro.
Ier arms were close about his throat; he kissed
them again, and kissed her eyes, her cheek, her
mouth; then put her from him quickly and went
out.
She ran to him, and threw herself on the damp
ground and held him there, and leaned her forehead on his feet. But though he looked at her
with wet eyes, he did not yield, and he still
said,"I will come back soon-very soon-be quiet,
dear, let me go."
Then he kissed her once more many times, and
put her gently within the door and closed it.




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.      187
A low, sharp, sudden cry reached him, went to
his heart, but he did not turn; he went on through
the wet, green little garden, and the curling leaves,
where he had found peace and had left desolation.




CHAPTER       XXI.
WILL let her alone and she will marry
Jeannot," thought Flamen; and he believed himself a good man for once in
his life, and pitied himself for having become a
sentimentalist.
She would marry Jeannot, and bear many children, as those people always did; and ruddy little
peasants would cling about those pretty, soft, little
breasts of hers; and she would love them after
the manner of such women, and be very content
clattering over the stones in her wooden shoes;
and growing brown and stout, and more careful
after money, and ceasing to dream of unknown
things, and not seeing God at all in the fields,
but looking low and beholding only the ears of
the gleaning wheat and the feet of the tottering
children; and so gaining her bread, and losing
her soul, and stooping nearer and nearer to earth
till she dropped into it like one of her own windblown wall-flowers when the bee has sucked out
all its sweetness and the heats have scorched up
all its bloom:-yes, of course, she would marry
Jeannot and end so!
188




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.       189
Meanwhile he had his Gretchen, and that was
the one great matter.
So he left the street of Mary of Burgundy, and
went on his way out of the chiming city as its
matin bells were rung, and took with him a certain
regret, and the only innocent affection that had
ever awakened in him; and thought of his selfnegation with half admiration and half derision;
and so drifted away into the whirlpool of his
amorous, cynical, changeful, passionate, callous,
many-colored life, and said to himself as he saw
the last line of the low green plains shine against
the sun,-"She will marry Jeannot-of course,
she will marry Jeannot. And my Gretchen is
greater than Scheffer's."
What else mattered very much, after all, except
what they would say in Paris of Gretchen?




CHAPTER XXII.
EOPLE saw that Bebee had grown very
quiet. But that was all they saw.
IIer little face was pale as she sat among
her glowing autumn blossoms, by the side of the
cobbler's stall; and when the Varnhart children
cried at the gate to her to come and play, she
would answer gently that she was too busy to have
play-time now.
The fruit-girl of the Montagne de la Cour hooted
after her, "Gone so soon?-oh he! what did I say?
-a fine pine is sugar in the teeth a second only,
but the brown nuts you may crack all the seasons
round. Well, did you make good harvest while it
lasted? has Jeannot a fat bridal portion promised?"
And old Jehan, who was the tenderest soul of
them all in the lane by the swans' water, would
come and look at her wistfully as she worked
among the flowers, and would say to her,"Dear little one, there is some trouble-does it
come of that painted picture? You never laugh
now, Bebee, and that is bad. A girl's laugh is
pretty to hear; my girl laughed like little bells
ringing-and then it stopped, all at once; they said
190




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SIOES.


191


she was dead. But you are not dead, Be6be. And
yet you are so silent; one would say you were."
But to the mocking of the fruit-girl, as to the
tenderness of old Jehan, Bebec answered nothing;
the lines of her pretty curled mouth grew grave
and sad, and in her eyes there was a wistful bewildered pathetic appeal like the look in the eyes
of a beaten dog, which, while it aches with pain,
does not cease to love its master.
One resolve upheld her, and made her feet firm
on the stones of the streets and her lips mute under
all they said to her. Sle would learn all she could,
and be good, and patient, and wise, if trying could
make her wise, and so do his will in all thingsuntil he should come back.
"You are not gay, Bebee," said Annemie, who
grew so blind that she could scarce see the flags at
the mastheads, and who still thought that she
pricked the lace patterns and earned her bread.
" You are not gay, dear. Ias any lad gone to
sea that your heart goes away with, and do you
watch for his ship coming in with the coasters? It
is weary work waiting-but it is all the men think
us fit for, child. They may set sail as they like;
every new port has new faces for them; but we are
to sit still and to pray if we like, and never murmur, be the voyage ever so long, but be ready with
a smile and a kiss, a fresh pipe of tobacco, and a
dry pair of socks;-that is a man. We. may have
cried our hearts out-we must have ready the pipe
and the socks, or, 'Is that what you call love?' they




192     TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
grumble. You want mortal patience if you love a
man,-it is like a fretful child that thumps you
when your breast is bare to it. Still-be you
patient, dear, just as I am, just as I am."
And Bebee would shudder as she swept the cobwebs from the garret walls,-patient as she wasshe who had sat here fifty years watching for a
dead man and for a wrecked ship.




CHAPTER       XXIII.
TIE wheat was reapen in the fields, and the
brown earth turned afresh. The white and
purple chrysanthemums bloomed against
the flowerless rose-bushes, and the little gray Michaelmas daisy flourished where the dead carnations
had spread their glories. Leaves began to fall
and chilly winds to sigh among the willows; the
squirrels began to store away their nuts, and the
poor to pick up the broken, bare boughs.
" HIe said he would come before winter," thought
Bebee, every day when she rose and felt each morning cooler and grayer than the one before it; winter
was near.
Her little feet already were cold in their wooden
shoes; and the robin already sang in the twigs
of the sear sweet-brier; but she had the brave
sweet faith which nothing kills, and she did not
doubt-oh! no, she did not doubt, she was only
tired.
Tired of the strange, sleepless, feverish nights;
tired of the long, dull, empty days; tired of watching down the barren, leafless lane; tired of hearkening breathless to each step on the rustling dead
17              N               198




194


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


leaves; tired of looking always, always, always, into
the rud(ly autumn evenintgs and the cold autumn
starligiht, and never hearing what she listened for,
never seeing what she sought; tired as a clild may
be, lost in a wood, and wearily wearinig its small
strength and breaking its young heart in search
of the track forever missed, of the home forever
beyond the horizon.
Still she did her work and kept her courage.
She took ler way into the town with her basket
full of the ruby and amber of the dusky autumn
blossoms, and whlen those failed, and the garden
was quite desolate, except for a promise of haws
and of holly, she went, as she had always done,
to the lace-room, and gained her bread and the
chickens' corn each day by winding the thread
round the bobbills; and at nightfall, when she had
plodded home through tlhe darksome roads and
over the sodden turf, and had lit her rushlight and
sat down to her books, with her hand buried in
her hair, and her eyes smarting from the strain of
the lace-work, and her heart aching with that new
and deadly pain which never left her now, she
would read-read-read-read, and try and store
her brain with knowledge, and try and grasp these
vast new meanings of life that the books opened to
her, and try and grow less ignorant against he
should return.
There was much she could not understand, but
there was also much she could.
Her mind was delicate and quick, her intelli



TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


195


gence swift and strong; she bought old books at
bookstalls with pence that she saved by going without her dinner. The keeper of the stall, a shrewd
old soul, explained some hard points to her, and
chose good volumes for her, and lent others to this
solitary little student in her wooden shoes and with
her pale child's face.
So she toiled hard and learned much, and grew
taller and very thin, and got a look in her eyes like
a lost dog's, and yet never lost heart or wandered
in the task that he had set her, or in her faith in
his return.
"Burn the books,     ebee,'" whispered  the
children again and again, clinging to her skirts.
"Burn the wicked, silent tlhings. Since you have
had them you never sing, or romp, or laugh, and
you look so white-so white."
Bebee kissed them, but kept to her books.
Jeannot going by from the forest night after
night saw the light twinkling in the hut window,
and sometimes crept softly up and looked through
the chinks of the wooden shutter, and saw her
leaning over some big old volume with her pretty
brows drawn together, and her mouth shut close
in earnest effort, and he would curse the man who
had changed her so, and go away with rage in his
breast and tears in his eyes, not daring to say any
thing, but knowing that never would Bebee's little
brown band lie in love within his own.
Nor even in friendship, for he had rashly spoken
rough words against the stranger from Rubes'




196


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


land, and Bebee ever since then had passed him
by with a grave simple greeting, and when he had
brought her in timid gifts a barrow-load of fagots,
had thanked him, but had bidden him take the
wood home to his mother.
"You think evil things of me, Bebee?" good
Jeannot had pleaded, with a sob in his voice; and
she had answered gently,"No; but do not speak to me, that is all."
Then he had cursed her absent lover, and Bebee
gone within and closed her door.
She had no idea that the people thought ill of
her. They were cold to her, and such coldness
made her heart ache a little more. But the one
great love ip her possessed her so strongly that all
other things were half unreal.
She did her daily housework from sheer habit,
and she studied because he had told her to do it,
and because with the sweet, stubborn, credulous
faith of her youth, she never doubted that he would
return.
Otherwise there was no perception of real life in
her; she dreamed and prayed, and prayed and
dreamed, and never ceased to do either one or the
other, even when she was scattering potato-peels to
the fowls, or shaking carrots loose of the soil, or
sweeping the snow from her hut door, or going out
in the raw dark dawn as the single little sad bell
of St. Guido tolled through the stillness for the
first mass.
For though even Father Francis looked angered




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


197


at her because he thought she was stubborn, and
hid some truth and some shame from him at confession, yet she went resolutely and oftener than
ever to kneel in the dusty, dusky, crumbling old
church, for it was all she could do for him who
was absent-so she thought-and she did not feel
quite so far away fronl him when she was beseeching Christ to have care of his soul and of
his body.
All her pretty dreams were dead.
She never heard any story in the robin's song,
or saw any promise in the sunset clouds, or fancied
that angels came about her inl the night-never now.
The fields were gray and sad; the birds were
little brown things; the stars were cold and far off;
the people she had used to care for were like mere
shadows that went by her meaningless and without
interest, and all she thought of was the one step
that never came; all she wanted was the one touch
she never felt.
"You have done wrong, Bebee, and you will not
own it," said the few neighbors who ever spoke to
her.
Bebee looked at them with wistful, uncomprehending eyes.
"I have done no wrong," she said gently, but no
one believed her.
A girl did not shut herself up and wane pale and
thin for nothing, so they reasoned. She might have
sinned as she had liked if she had been sensible
after it, and married Jeannot.
17*




198     TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.
But to fret mutely, and shut her lips, and seem
as though she had done nothing-that was guilt
indeed.
For her village, in its small way, thought as the
big world thinks.




F __ a'Pt'~T-  I C~-i   ml


I - w -  1_ -


CHAPTER XXIV.


ULL winter came.
The snow was deep, and the winds drove
the people with whips of ice along the
dreary country roads and the steep streets of the
city. The bells of the dogs and the mules sounded
sadly through the white misty silence of the Flemish plains, and the weary horses slipped and fell on
the frozen ruts and on the jagged stones in the little
frost-shut Flemish towns. Still the Flemish folk
were gay enough in many places.
There were fairs and kermesses; there were puppet-plays and church-feasts; there were sledges on
the plains and skates on the canals; there were
warm woolen hoods and ruddy wood-fires; there
were tales of demons and saints, and bowls of hot
onion soup; sugar images for the little children,
and blessed beads for the maidens clasped on rosy
throats with lovers' kisses; and in the city itself
there was the high tide of the winter pomp and
mirth, with festal scenes in the churches, and balls
at the palaces, and all manner of gay things in toys
and jewels, and music playing cheerily under the
leafless trees, and flashes of scarlet cloth, and
199




200


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


shining furs, and happy faces, and golden curls, in
the carriages that climbed the Montagne de la
Cour, and filled the big place around the statue of
stout Godfrey.
In the little village above St. Guido, Bebee's
neighbors were merry too, in their simple way.
The women worked away wearily at their lace
in the dim winter light, and made a wretched living
by it, but all the same they got penny playthings
for their babies, and a bit of cake for their Sunday
hearth. They drew together in homely and cordial
friendship, and of an afternoon when dusk fell wove
their lace in company in Mere-Krebs's mill-house
kitchen, with the children and the dogs at their
feet on the bricks, so that one big fire might serve
for all, and all be lighted with one big rush candle,
and all be beguiled by chit-chat and songs, stories
of spirits, and whispers of ghosts, and now and then
when the wind howled at its worst, a paternoster
or two said in common for the men toiling in the
barges or drifting up the Scheldt.
In these gatherings Be6be's face was missed, and
the blithe soft sound of her voice, like a young
thrush singing, was never heard.
The people looked in, and saw her sitting over a
great open book-often her hearth had no fire.
TThen the children grew tired of asking her to
play; and their elders began to shake their heads;
she was so pale and so quiet, there must be some
evil in it-so they began to think.
Little by little people dropped away from her.




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


201


Who knew, the gossips said, what shame or sin the
child might not have on her sick little soul?
True, Bebee worked hard just the same, and
just the same was seen trudging to and fro in the
dusk of dawns and afternoons in her two little
wooden shoes. She was gentle and laborious, and
gave the children her goat's milk, and the old
women the brambles of her garden.
But they grew afraid of her-afraid of that sad,
changeless, far-away look in her eyes, and of the
mute weariness that was on her-and, being perplexed, were sure, like all ignorant creatures, that
what was secret must be also vile.
So they hung aloof, and let her alone, and byand-by scarcely nodded as they passed her, but said
to Jeannot,"You were spared a bad thing, lad; the child
was that grand painter's light-o'-love, that is plain
to see. The mischief all comes of the stuff old
Antoine filled her head with-a stray little byblow of chickweed that he cockered up like a rare
carnation. Oh! do not fly in a rage, Jeannot; the
child is no good, and would have made an honest
man rue. Take heart of grace, and praise the
saints, and marry Katto's Lisa."
But Jeannot would never listen to the slanderers,
and would never look at Lisa, even though the
door of the little hut was always closed against
him, and whenever he met Bebee on the highway
she never seemed to see him more than she saw
the snow that her sabots were treading.




202


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


One night in the midwinter-time old Annemie
died.
Bebee found her in the twilight with her head
against the garret window, and her left side all
shriveled and useless. She had a little sense left,
and a few fleeting breaths to draw.
' Look for the brig," she muttered. "You will
not see the flag at the masthead for the fog tonight; but his socks are dry and his pipe is ready.
Keep looking-keep looking-she will be in port
to-night."
But her dead sailor never came into port; she
went to him. The poor, weakened, faithful old
body of her was laid in the graveyard of the poor,
and the ships came and went under the empty
garret window, and B1ebee was all alone.
She had no more anything to work for, or any
bond with the lives of others. She could live on
the roots of her garden and the sale of her hens'
eggs, and she could change the turnips and carrots
that grew in a little strip of her ground for the
quantity of bread that she needed.
So she gave herself up to the books, and drew
herself more and more within from the outer
world.  She did not know that the neighbors
thought very evil of her; she had only one idea in
her mind-to be more worthy of him against he
should return.
The winter passed away somehow; she did not
know how.
It was a long, cold, white blank of frozen




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


203


silence; that was all. She studied hard, and had
got a quaint, strange, deep, scattered knowledge
out of her old books; her face had lost all its
roundness and color, but, instead, the forehead
had gained breadth and the eyes had the dim fire
of a student's.
Every night when she shut her volumes she
thought,"I am a little nearer him. I know a little
more."
Just so every morning, when she bathed her
hands in the chilly water, she thought to herself,
" I will make my skin as soft as I can for him, that
it may be like the ladies' he has loved."
Love to be perfect must be a religion, as well as
a passion. Bebee's was so. Like George Ierbert's serving-maiden, she swept no specks of dirt
away from a floor without doing it to the service
of lier lord.
Only Be'bee's lord was a king of earth, made of
earth's dust and vanities.
But what did she know of that?




CHAPTER XXV.
TIE winter went by, and the snow-drops and
crocus and pale liepatica smiled at her from
the black clods. Every other spring-time
Bebee had run with fleet feet under the budding
trees down into the city, and had sold sweet little
wet bunches of violets and brier before all the snow
was melted from the eaves of the Broodhuis.
" The winter is gone," the townspeople used to
say; "look, there is Bebee with the flowers."
But this year they did not see the little figure
itself like a rosy crocus standing against the brown
timbers of the Maison de Roi.
Bebee had not heart to pluck a single blossom
of them all. She let them all live, and tended
them so that the little garden should look its best
and brightest to him when his hand should lift its
latch.
Only he was so long coming-so very long; the
violets died away, and the first rosebuds came in
their stead, and still Bebee looked every dawn and
every nightfall vainly down the empty road.
Nothing kills young creatures like the bitterness
of waiting.
204




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


205


Pain they will bear, and privation they will pass
througlh, fire and water and storm will not appal
them, nor wrath of heaven and earth, but waiting
-the long, tedious, sickly, friendless days, that
drop one by one in their eternal sameness into the
weary past, these kill slowly but surely, as the slow
dropping of water frets away rock.
The summer came.
Nearly a year had gone by. Bebee worked early
and late. The garden bloomed like one big rose,
and the neighbors slook their heads to see the
flowers blossom and fall without bringing in a
single coin.
She herself spoke less seldom than ever, and
now when old Jehan, who never had understood
the evil thoughts of his neighbors, asked her what
ailed her that she looked so pale and never stirred
down to the city, now her courage failed her, and
the tears brimmed over her eyes, and she could not
call up a brave brief word to answer him. For
the time was so long, and she was so tired.
Still she never doubted that her lover would
come back: he had said he would come: she was
as sure that he would come as she was sure that
God came in the midst of the people when the
silver bell rang and the Iost was borne by on
high.
Beb6ee did not heed much, but she vaguely felt
the isolation she was left in: as a child too young
to reason feels cold and feels hunger.
"No one wants me here now that Annemie is
18




206


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


gone," she thought to herself, as the sweet green
spring days unfolded themselves one by one like
the buds of the brier-rose hedges.
And nowy and then even the loyal little soul of
her gave way, and sobbing on her lonely bed in
the long dark nights, she would cry out against
him, " Oh, why not have left me alone? I was so
happy-so happy!"
And then she would reproach herself with treason to him and inlgratitude, and hate herself and
feel guilty in her own sight to have thus sinned
against him in thought for one siingle instant.
For: there are natures in which the generosity of
love is so strong that it feels its own just pain to
be disloyalty; and Bebee's was one of them. And
if lie had killed her she would have died hoping
only that no moan had escaped her under the blow
that ever could accuse him.
These natures, utterly innocent by force of selfaccusation and self'abasement, suffer at once the
torment of the victim and the criminal.




CIAPTER        XXVI.
NE day in the May weather she sat withindoors with a great book upon her table,
but tno sight fo(r it in her aching eyes. The
starling hopped to and fro on the sunny floor; the
bees boomed in the porch; the tinkle of sheep's
bells came in on the stillness. All was peaceful
and happy except the little weary, breaking, desolate heart that beat in her like a caged bird's.
"I-e will come; I am sure he will come," she
said to herself; but she was so tired, and it was so
long-oh, dear God!-so very long.
A hand tapped at the lattice. The shrill voic'e
of Reine, the sabot-maker's wife, broken with
angnislh, called through the hanging ivy,"Be6be, you are a wicked one, they say, but the
only one there is at home in the village this day.
Get you to town for the love of Ileaven, and send
Doctor Max hither, for my pet, my flower, my child
lies dying, and not a soul tnear, and she black as a
coal with choking — go o, go!-and Mary will forgive you your sins. Save the little one, dear Bebee,
do you hear? and I will pray God and speak fair
the neighbors for you. Go!"
207




208


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


Bebee rose up, startled by the now unfamiliar
sound of a human voice, and looked at the breathless mother with eyes of pitying wonder.
Surely I will go," she said, gently; " but there
is no need to bribe me. I have not sinned greatly
-that I know."
Then she went out quickly and ran through the
lanes and into the city for the sick child, and found
the wise man, and sent him, and did the errand
rather in a sort of sorrowful sympathetic instinct
than in any reasoning consciousness of doing good.
When she was moving through the once-familiar and happy ways as the sun was setting on the
golden fronts of the old houses, and the chimes
were ringing fiom the many-towers, a strange
sense of unreality, of non-existence, fell upon her.
Could it be she? —she indeed-who had gone
there the year before the gladdest thing that the
earth bore, with no care except to shelter her
flowers from the wind, and keep the freshest blossoms for the burgomaster's housewife?
She did not think thus to herself; but a vague
doubt that she could ever have been the little gay,
laborious, happy Bebee, with troops of friends and
endless joys for every day that dawned, came over
her as she went by the black front of the Broodhuis.
The strong voice of Lisa, the fiuit-girl, jarred
on her as she passed the stall under its yellow awning that was flapping sullenly in the evening wind.
"Oh he, little fool," the mocking voice cried,
" the rind of the fine pine is full of prickles, and




TWO LITTLE WFOODEN SHOES.


stings the lips when the taste is gone?-to be sure
-crack common nuts like me, and you are never
wanting-hazels grow free in every copse. Prut,
tut! your grand lover lies a-dying; so the students read out of this just now; and you such a
simpleton as not to get a roll of napoleons out of
him before he went to rot in Paris. I dare say he
was poor as sparrows, if one knew the truth. Ile
was only a painter after all."
Lisa tossed her as she spoke a torn sheet, in
whicli she was wrapping gentians: it was a piece
of newspaper some three weeks old, and in it there
was a single line or so which said that the artist
Flamen, whdse Gretchen was the wonder of the
Salon of the year, lay sick unto death in his rooms
in Paris.
Be6bee stood and read; the strong ruddy western
light upon the type, the taunting laughter of the
fiuit-girl on her ear.
A bitter shriek rang from her that made even the
cruelty of Lisa's mirth stop in a sudden terror.
She stood staring like a thing changed to stone
down on the one name that to her filled all the
universe.
"Ill-he is ill-do you hear?" she echoed piteously, looking at Lisa; "and you say he is poor?"
" Poor? for sure! is he not a painter?" said the
fruit-girl, roughly. She judged by her own penniless student-lads; and she was angered with herself
for feeling sorrow for this little silly thing that she
had loved to torture.
18*              o




210


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


"You have been bad and base to me; but now
-I bless you, I love you, I will pray for you,"
said Bebee, in a swift broken breath, and with a
look upon her face that startled into pain her callous enemy.
Then without another word, she thrust the paper
in her bosom, and ran out of the square breathless
with haste and with a great resolve.
He was ill-and he was poor! The brave little
soul of her leaped at once to action. IIe was sick,
and far away; and poor they said. All danger and
all difficulty faded to nothing before the vision of
his need.
Bebe was only a little foundling who ran about
in wooden shoes; but she had the "dog's soul" in
her-the soul that will follow faithfully though to
receive a curse, that will defend loyally though to
meet a blow, and that will die mutely loving to the
last.
She went home, how she never knew; and without the delay of a moment packed up a change of
linen, and fed the fowls and took the key of the
hut down to old Jehan's cabin. The old man was
only half-witted by reason of his affliction for his
dead daughter, but he was shrewd enough to understand what she wanted of him, and honest
enough to do it.
"I am going into the city," she said to him;
"and if I am not back to-night, will you feed the
starling and the hens, and water the flowers for
me?"




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


211


Old Jehan put his head out of his lattice; it was
seven in the evening, and lie was going to bed.
"What are you after, little one?" he asked;
"going to show the fine buckles at a students'
ball? Nay, fie —that is not like you."
"I am going to-pray,-dear Jehan," she answered, with a sob in her throat and the first falsehood she ever had told. " Do what I ask youdo for your dead daughter's sake-or the birds and
the flowers will die of hunger and thirst. Take the
key and promise me."
lie took the key, and promised.
"Do not let them see those buckles shine; they
will rob you," he added.
Bebee ran from him fast; every moment that
was lost was so precious and so terrible. To pause a
second for fear's sake never occurred to her. She
went forth as fearlessly as a young swallow, born in
northern April days, flies forth on instinct to new
lands and over unknown seas when autumn falls.
Necessity and action breathed new life into her.
The hardy and brave peasant ways of her were
awoke once more. She had been strong to wait
silently with the young life in her dying out drop
by drop in the heart-sickness of long delay. She
was strong now to throw herself into strange countries and dim perils and immeasurable miseries, on
the sole chance that she might be of service to him.
A few human souls here and there can love like
dogs. Bebee's was one.
CDO




CHAPTER       XXVII.
T was dark. The May days are short in
the north lands of the Scheldt.
She had her little winter cloak of frieze
and her wooden shoes and her little white cap,
with the sunny curls rippling out of it in their
pretty rebellion. She had her little lantern too;
and her bundle; and she had put a few fresh eggs
in her basket, with some sweet herbs and the
palm-sheaf that Father Francis had blessed last
Easter-for who could tell, she thought, how ill
he might not be, or how poor?
She hardly gave a look to the hut as she ran by
its garden gate; all her heart was on in front, in
the vague far-off country where he lay sick unto
death.
She ran fast through the familiar lanes into the
city. She was not very sure where Paris was, but
she had the name clear and firm, and she knew
that people were always coming and going thence
and thither, so that she had no fear she should not
find it.
She went straight to the big busy bewildering
place in the Leopold quarter where the iron horses
212




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


213


fumed every day and night along the iron ways.
She had never been there before, but she knew it
was by that great highway that the traffic to Paris
was carried on, and she knew that it would carry
people also as well.
There were bells clanging, lights flashing, and
crowds pushing and shouting, as she ran up-a
little gray figure, with the lantern-spark glimmering like any tiny glow-worm astray in a gas-lit city.
"To Paris?" she asked, entreatingly, going
where she saw others going, to a little grated
wicket in a wall.
"Twenty-seven francs-quick!" they demanded
of her.
Bebee gave a great cry, and stood still, trembling
and trying not to sob aloud.  She had never
thought of money; she had forgotten that youth
and strength and love and willing feet and piteous
prayers-all went for nothing as this world is made.
A hope flashed on her, and a glad thought. She
loosed the silver buckles, and held them out.
" Would you take these? They are worth much
more."
There was a derisive laughter; some one bade
here with an oath begone; rough shoulders jostled
her away. She stretched her arms out piteously.
"Take me-oh, pray take me! I will go with
the sheep, with the cattle-only, only, take me!"
But in the rush and roar none heeded her;
some thief snatched the silver buckles from her
hand, and made off with them and was lost in the




214


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


throng; a great iron beast rushed by her, snorting
flame and bellowing smoke; there was a roll like
thunder, and all was (ark; the night express had
passed on its way to Paris.
Bebee stood still, crushed for a moment with
the noise and the cruelty and the sense of absolute desolation; she scar.cely noticed that the
buckles had been stolen; she had only one
thought-to get to Paris.
"Can I never-go without money?" she asked
at the wicket; the man there glanced a moment,
with a touch of pity, at the little wistful face.
"The least is twenty francs-surely you must
know that?" he said, and shut his grating with a
clang.
Bebee turned away and went out of the great
cruel tumultuous place; her heart ached and her
brain was giddy, but the sturdy courage of her
nature rose to need.
"There is no way at all to go without money
to Paris, I suppose?" she asked of an old woman
whom she knew a little, who sold nuts and little
pictures of saints and wooden playthings under the
trees, in the avenue hard by.
The old woman shook her head.
"Eh?-no, dear. There is nothing to be done
anywhere in the world without money. Look, I
cannot get a litre of nuts to sell unless I pay beforehand."
"Would it be far to walk?"
"Far! Ioly Jesus! It is right away in the heart




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


215


of France-over two hundred miles, they say;
straight out through the forest. Not but what my
son did walk it once-and he a shoemaker, who
knows what walking costs; and he is well-to-do
there now-not that he ever writes. When they
want nothing people never write."
" And he walked into Paris?"
"Yes, ten years ago. lie had nothing but a few
sols arid an ash stick, and he had a fancy to try
his luck there. And after all our feet were given
us to travel with. If you go there and you see
hinl, tell him to send me something-I am tired
of selling nuts."
Bebee said notling, but went on her road; since
there was no other way but to walk she would take
that way; the distance and the hardship did not
appal two little feet that were used to traverse so
nallny miles of sun-baked summer dust and of
frozen winter mud unblenchingly year after year.
The time it would take made her heart sink indeed. He was ill. God knew what might happen.
But neither the length of leagues nor the fatigue of
body daunted her. She only saw his eyes dim with
pain and his lips burned with fever.
She would walk twenty miles a day, and then,
perhaps, she might get lifts here and there on haywagonls or in peddlers' carts; people had always
used to be kind to her. Anyhow she counted she
might reach Paris well in fifteen days.
She sat under a shrine in a by street a moment,
and counted the copper pieces she had on her;




216


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


they were few, and the poor pretty buckles that
she might have sold to get money, were stolen.
She had some twenty sous and a dozen eggs;
she thought she might live on that; she had
wanted to take the eggs to him, but after all, to
keep life in her until she could reach Paris was
the one great thing.
"What a blessing it is to have been born poor;
and to have lived hardly-one wants so little!" she
thought to herself.
Then she put up the sous in the linen bosom of
her gown, and trimmed her little lantern and knelt
down in the quiet darkness and prayed a moment,
with the hot agonized tears rolling down her face,
and then rose and stepped out bravely in the cool
of the night, on the great southwest road towards
Paris.
The thought never once crossed her to turn back,
and go again into the shelter of her own little hut
among the flowers. He was sick there, dying, for
anything she knew-that was the only thing she
remembered.
It was a clear, starlit night, and everywhere the
fragrance of the spring was borne in from the wide
green plains, and the streams where the rushes
were blowing.
She walked ten miles easily, the beautiful gray
shadow all about her. She had never been so far
from home in all her life, except to that one Kermesse at Mechlin. But she was not afraid.
With the movement, and the air, and the sense




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


217


that she was going to him, which made her happy
even in her misery, something of the old, sweet,
lost fancies camre to her.
She smiled at the stars through her tears, and as
the poplars swayed and murmured in the wind,
they looked to her like the wings and the swords
of a host of angels.
Her way lay out through the forest, and in that
sweet green woodland she was not afraid —no more
afraid tlhan the fawns were.
At Boitsfort she shrank a little, indeed. IIere
there were the open-air restaurants, and the cafe
gardens all alight for the pleasure-seekers from the
city; here there were music and laughter, and
horses with brass bells, and bright colors on high
in the wooden balconies, and below among the
blossominig hawthorn hedges.  She had to go
through it all, and she shuddered a little as she
ran, thinking of that one priceless, deathless forest
day when he had kissed her first.
But the pleasure-people were all busied with
their mirth and mischief, and took no notice of the
little gray figure in the starry night. She went on
along the grassy roads, under the high arching
trees, with the hoot of the owls and the cry of the
rabbits on the stillness.
At Groenendael, in the heart of the forest, midnight was striking as she entered the village.
Every one was asleep. The lights were all out.
The old ruined priory frowned dark under the
clouds.
19




218


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


She shivered a little again, and began to feel
chill atnd tired, yet did not dare to knock at any
one of the closed house-doors-she had no money.
So she walked on her first ten unknown miles,
meeting a few people only, and being altogether
unmolested-a small gray figure, trotting iu two
little wooden shoes.
They thought ler a peasant going to a fiair a
]ace-mill, and no one did her more harm than to
wish her good-night in roughl Flemish.
WhVen the dawn began to whiten above the plains
of the east, she saw an emlpty cowshed filled with
hay; sle was a little tired, and lay down and rested
an hour or two, as a young lamb might have lain
oil the dried clover, for she knew that she must
keep her strength and husband her power, or never
reach across the dreary length of the foreign land
to Paris.
But by full sunrise she was on her way again,
bathing her face in a brook and buying a sou's
worth of bread and flet-nmilk at the first cottage
that she passed in bright, leaf-bowered IIoeylaert.
The forest was still all around her, with its exquisite life of bough and blossom, and murmur of
insect and of bird. She told her beads, praying as
she went, and was almost happy.
God would not let him die. Oh, no, not till she
had kissed him once more, and could die witl him.
The lhares ran across the path, and the blue butterflies flew above-head. There was purple gloom
of pinewood, and sparkling verdure of aspen and




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


219


elm. There were distant church carillons ringing,
and straight golden shafts of sunshline streaming.
She was quite sure God would not let him die.
Slhe hoped that he might be very poor. At times
he had talked as if hle were, and then she night be
of so much use. She knew how to deal with fever
ald suffering. She had sat up many a night with
the children of the village. The gray sisters had
taught her many of their ways of battling with
disease; and she could make fresh cool drinks,
and she could brew beautiful remedies from simple
herbs. There was so much that she niight do; her
fancy played with it almost happily. And then, only
to touch his halnd, only to hear his voice; her heart
rose at the thought, as lark to its morning song.
At Rixensart, buried in its greenery, as she went
through it in mnorning light, sonie peasants greeted
her cheerily, and called to her to rest in a houseporch, and gave her honey and bread. Shle could
not eat much; hler tongule was parched and her
throat was dry, but the kindness was precious to
her, and she went on her road the stronger for it.
"It is a long way to walk to Paris," said the
woman, with some curious wonder. Bebee smiled,
though her eyes grew wet.
"She has the look of the little Gesu," said the
Rixensart people, and they watched her away with
a vague timid pity.
So slie went on through Ottignies and La Roche,
to Villers, and left the great woods and the city
chimes behind her, and came through the green




220


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


abbey valleys through Tilly and Ligny, and Fleurus, and so into the coal and iron fields that lie
round Charleroi.
Iere her heart grew sick, and her courage sank
under the noise and the haste, before the blackness
and the hideousness. She had never seen anything
like it. She thought it was hell, with the naked,
swearing, fighting people, and the red fires leaping
night and day. Nevertheless, if hell it were, since
it lay betwixt her and him, she found force to brave
and cross it.
The miners and glass-blowers and nail-makers,
rough and fierce and hard, frightened her. The
women did not look like women, and the children
ran and yelled at her, and set their dogs upon her.
The soil was thick with dust like soot, and the
trees were seared and brown. There was no peace
in the place, and no loveliness. Eighty thousand
folks toiled together in the hopeless Tophet, and
swarmed, and struggled, and labored, and multiplied, in joyless and endless wrestling against
hunger and death.
She got through it somehow, hiding often from
the ferocious youngsters, and going sleepless rather
than lie in those dens of filth; but she seemed so
many, many years older when Charleroi lay at last
behind her-so many, many years older than when
she had sat and spun in the garden at home.
When she was once in the valley of the Sambre
she was more herself again, only she felt weaker
than she had ever done, because she only dared to




TWO LITTLE WTOODEN SHOES.


221


spend one of her sous each day, and one sou got so
little food.
In the woods and fields about Alne she began to
breathe again, like a bird loosed to the air after
being shut in a wooden trap. Green corn, green
boughs, green turf, mellow chimes of church-bells,
humming of golden bees, cradle songs of women
spinning, homely odors of little herb-gardens and
of orchard-trees under cottage walls-these had
been around her all her life; she only breathed
freely among them.
She often felt tired, and her wooden shoes were
wearing so thin that the hot dust of the road at
noonday burnt her feet through them. Sometimes,
too, she felt a curious brief faintness such as she
had never known, for the lack of food and the long
fatigue began to tell even on her hardy little body.
But she went on bravely, rarely doing less than
her twenty niles a day, and sometimes more, walking often in the night to save time, and lying down
in cow-sheds or under haystacks in the noontide.
For the most part people were kind to her;
they saw she was so very young and so poor.
Women would give her leave to bathe herself
in their bed-chambers, and children would ask her
to wait on the village bench under the chestnuttree, wlile they brought her their pet lamb or
their tumbler pigeons to look at, but, for the most
part-unless she was very, very tired-she would
not wait. It took her so long, and who could tell
how it fared with him in Paris?
19*




222


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


Into the little churches, scattered over the wide
countries between Charleroi and Erquelinnes, she
would turn aside, indeed; but, then, that was only
to say a prayer for him; that was not loss to him,
but gain.
So she walked on until she reached the frontier
of France. She began to get a little giddy; she
began to see the blue sky and the green level
always swirling round her as if some one were
spinning them to frighten her, but still she would
not be afraid; she went on, and on, and on, till
she set her last step on the soil of Flanders.
Itere a new strange, terrible, incomprehensible
obstacle opposed her: she had no papers; they
thrust her back and spoke to her as if she were a
criminal. She could not understand what they
could mean. She had never heard of these laws
and rules. She vaguely comprehended that she
must not enter France, and stunned and heartbroken she dropped down under a tree, and for
the first time sobbed as if her very life would
weep itself away.
She could see nothing, understand nothing.
There were the sane road, the same hedges, the
same fields, the same white cottages, and peasants
in blue shirts and dun-hued oxen in the wagons.
She saw no mark, no difference, ere they told her
where she stood was Belgium, and where they stood
was France, and that she must not pass from one
into the other.
The men took no notice of her. They went




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


223


back into their guard-house, and smoked and
drank. A cat sunned herself under a scarlet bean.
The white clouds sailed on before a southerly sky.
She might die here-he there-and nothing seemed
to care.
After awhile an old hawker came up; he was
traveling with wooden clocks from the Black Forest. He stopped and looked at her, and asked her
what she ailed.
She knelt down at his feet in the dust.
' Oh, help me!" she cried to him. "Oh, pray,
help me! I have walled all the way from Brussels
-that is ny country, and now they will not let me
pass that house where the soldiers are. They say I
have no papers. What papers should I have? I do
not know. When one has done no harm, and does
not owe a sou anywhere, and has walked all the
way-Is it money that they want? I have none;
and they stole my silver clasps in Brussels; and if. do not get to Paris I must die-die without seeing him again-ever again, dear God!"
She dropped her head upon the dust and
crouched and sobbed there, her courage broken
by this new barrier that she had never dreamed
would come between herself and Paris.
The old hawker looked at her thoughtfully. I1
had seen much of men and women, and knew
truth from counterfeit, and he was moved by the
child's agony.
He stooped and whispered in her ear," Get up quick, and I will pass you. It is against




224


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


the law, and I may go to prison for it. Never
mind; one must risk something in this world, or
else be a cur. My daughter has stayed behind in
Marbais sweethearting; her name is on my passport, and her age and face will do for yours. Get
up and follow me close, and I will get you through.
Poor little soul! whatever your woe is it is real
enough, and you are such a young and pretty thing.
Get up, the guards are in their house, they have not
seen; follow me, and you must not speak a word;
they must take you for a German, dumb as wood."
She got up and obeyed him, not comprehending,
but only vaguely seeing that he was friendly to
her, and would pass her over into France.
The old man made a little comedy at the barrier,
and scolded her as though she were his daughter
for losing her way as she came to meet him, and
then crying like a baby.
The guards looked at her carelessly, joked the
hawker on her pretty face, looked the papers over,,
and let her through, believing her the child of the
clock-maker of the IIartz. Some lies are blessed
as truth.
" I have done wrong in the law, but not before
God, I think, little one," said the peddler. "Nay
-do not thank me, or go on like that; we are in
sight of the customs men still, and if they suspected,
it would be the four walls of a cell only that you
and I should see to-night. And now tell me your
story, poor maiden-why are you on foot through
a strange country?"




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


225


But Bebee would not tell him her story; she
was confused and dazed still. She did not know
rightly what had happened to her; hut she could not
talk of herself, nor of why she traveled thus to Paris.
The old hawker got cross at her silence, and
called her an unthankful jade, and wished that he
had left her to her fate, and parted company witl
her at two cross-roads, saying his path did not lie
with hers; and then when he had done that, was
sorry, and being a telder-hearted soul, hobbled
back, and would fain press a five-franc piece on
her; and Bebee, refusing it all the while, kissed
his old brown hands and blessed him, and broke
away from him, and so went on again solitary
towards St. Quentin.
The country was very flat and poor, and yet the
plains had a likeness in them to her own wide
Brabant downs, where the tall green wheat was
blowing and the barges dropping down the sluggish streams.
She was very footsore; very weary; very hungry
so often; but she was in France-in his country;
-and her spirit rose with the sense of that nearness to him.
After all God was so good to her; there were fine
bright days and nights; a few showers had fallen,
but merely passing ones; the air was so cool and
so balmy that it served her almost as food; and she
seldom found people so unkind that they refused
for her single little sou to give her a crust of bread
and let her lie in an outhouse.
p




226


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


After all God was very good; and by the sixteenth or seventeenth day she would be in the city
of Paris.
She was a little light-headed at times from insufficient nourishment; especially after waking
from strange dreams in unfamiliar places; sometimes the soil felt tremulous under her, and the
sky spun round; but she struggled against the
feeling, and kept a brave heart, and tried to be
afraid of nothing.
Sometimes at night she thought she saw old
Annemie. "But what if I do?" she said to herself; " Annemie ne'ver will hurt me."
And now, as she grew nearer her goal, her natural buoyancy of spirit returned as it had never
done to her since the evening that he had kissed
and left her. As her body grew lighter and more
exhausted, her fancy grew keener and more dominant. All things of the earth and air spoke to her
as she went along as they had used to do. All that
she had learned from the books in the long cold
months came to her clear and wonderful. She was
not so very ignorant now-ignorant, indeed, beside
him-but still knowing something that would nimke
her able to read to him if lie liked it, and to understand if he talked of grave things.
She had no fixed thought of what she would be
to him when she reached him.
She fancied she would wait on him, and tend
him, and make him well, and be caressed by him,
and get all gracious pretty things of leaf and blos



TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


227


som about him, and kneel at his feet, and be quite
happy if he only touchled her now anld then with
his lips;-lher thoughts went no further than that;
-her love for him was of that intensity and absorption in which nothing but itself is remenbered.
When a creature loves much, even when it is as
little and as simple a soul as Bebe', the world and
all its people and all its laws ald ways are as
naught. They cease to exist; they are as though
they had never been.
Whoever recollects an outside world may play
with passion, or may idle with sentiment, but does
not love.
She did iot hear what the villagers said to her.
She did not see the streets of the towns as she
passed them. She kept herself clean always, and
broke fist now and then by sheer instinict of
habit, nothing more. She had no perception what
she did, except of walking-walkinlg-walking
always, and seeing the white road go by like pale
ribbons unrolled.
She got a dreamy, intense, sleepless light in her
blue eyes that frightened some of those she passed.
They thought she had been fever-stricken, and was
not in her senses.
So she went across the dreary lowlands, wearing
out her little sabots, but not wearing out her
patience and her courage.
She was very dusty and jaded. Her woolen
skirt was stained with weather and torn with




'228


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


briers. But she had managed always to wash her
cap white in brook-water, and she had managed
always to keep her pretty bright curls soft and
silken-for he had liked them so much, and he
would soon draw them through his hand again.
So she told herself a thousand times to give her
strength when the mist would come over her sight,
and the earth would seem to tremble as she went.
Ot the fifteenth day from the night when she had
left her hut by the swans' water, Bebee saw Paris.
Shining away in the sun; white and gold;
among woods and gardens she saw Paris.
She was so tired-oh, so tired-but she could
not rest now. There were bells ringing always in
her ears, and a heavy pain always in her head.
But what of that?-she was so near to him.
"Are you ill, you little thing?" a woman asked
her who was gathering early cherries in the outskirts of the great city.
Bebee looked at her and smiled: " I do not know
-I am happy."
And she went onward.
It was evening. The sun had set. She had not
eaten for twenty-four hours. But she could not
pause for anything now. She crossed the gleaming river, and she heard the cathedral chimes.
Paris in all its glory was about her, but she took no
more note of it than a pigeon that flies through it
intent on reaching home.
No one looked at or stopped her; a little dusty
peasant with a bundle on a stick over her shoulder.




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


229


The click-clack of her wooden shoes on the hot
pavements made none look up; little rustics came
up every day like this to make their fortunes in
Paris. Some grew into golden painted silken
flowers, the convolvuli of their brief summer days;
and some drifted into the Seine water, rusted, windtossed, fallen leaves, that were wanted of no man.
Anyhow it was so common to see them, pretty but
homely things, with their noisy shoes and their
little all in a bundle, that no one even looked once
at Bebbee.
She was not bewildered. As she had gone
through her own city, only thinking of the roses
in her basket and of old Annemie in her garret, so
she went through Paris, only thinking of him for
whose sake she had come thither.
Now that she was really in his home she was
happy; happy though her head ached with that
dull odd pain, and all the sunny glare went round
and round like a great gilded humming-top, such
as the babies clapped their, hands at at the Kermesse.
She was happy; she felt sure now that God would
not let him die till she got to him. She was quite
glad that he had left her all that long, terrible winter, for she had learned so much and was so much
more fitted to be with him.
Weary as she was, and strange as the pain in her
head made her feel, she was happy, very happy;
a warm flush came on her little pale cheeks as she
thought how soon he would kiss them, her whole
20




230


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


body thrilled with the old sweet nameless joy that
she had sickened for in vain so long.
Though she saw nothing else that was around
her, she saw some little knots of moss-roses that a
girl was selling on the quay, as she used to sell
them in front of the Maison du Roi. She had only
two sous left, but she stopped and bought two little
rosebuds to take to him. HIe had used to care for
themn so much in the summer in Brabant.
Tle girl who sold them told her the way to the
street he lived in; it was not very far off the quay.
She seemed to float on air, to have wings like the
swallows, to hear beautiful music all around. She
felt for her beads, and said aves of praise. God
was so good.
It was quite night when she reached the street,
and sought the number of his house. She spoke
his name softly, and trembling very much with
joy, not with any fear, but it seemed to her too
sacred a thing ever to utter aloud.
An old man looked out of a den by the door,
and told her to go straight up the stairs to the
third floor, and then turn to the right. The old
man chuckled as he glanced after her, and listened
to the wooden shoes pattering wearily up the broad
stone steps.
Bebee climbed them-ten, twenty, thirty, forty.
" le must be very poor!" she thought, " to live so
high," and yet the place was wide and handsome,
and had a look of riches. Her heart beat so fast,
she felt suffocated; her limbs shook, her eyes had




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


231


a red blood-like mist floating before them; but she
thanked God each step she climbled-a moment,
and she would look upon the only face she loved.
"IIe will be glad;-oh, I am sure he will be
glad!" she said to herself, as a fear that had never
before come near her touched her for a momentif he should not care?
But even then, what did it matter? Since he
was ill she should be there to watch him night and
day; and when he was well again, if he should
wish her to go away-one could always (lie.
"But he will be glad-oh, I know he will be
glad!" she said to the rosebuds that she carried to
him. " And if God will only let me save his life,
what else do I wallt more?"
Iis name was written on a door before her.
The handle of a bell hung down; she pulled it
timidly. The door unclosed; she saw no one, and
went through. There were low lights burning.
There were heavy scents that were strange to her.
There was a fantastic gloom from old armor, and
old weapons, and old pictures in the dull rich
chambers. The sound of her wooden shoes was
lost in the softness and thickness of the carpets.
It was not the home of a poor man. A great
terror froze her heart;-if she were not wanted
here?
She went quickly through three rooms, seeing
no one, and at the end of the third there were folding-doors.
"It is I-Bebee," she said softly, as she pushed




232


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


them gently apart; and she held out the two mossrosebuds.
Then the words died on her lips, and a great
horror froze her, still and silent, there.
She saw the dusky room as in a dream. She saw
him stretched on the bed, leaning on his elbow,
laughing, and playing cards upon the lace coverlet.
She saw women with loose shining hair and bare
limbs, and rubies and diamonds glimmering red
and white. She saw men lying about upon the
couch, throwing dice and drinking and laughing
one with another.
Beyond all she saw against the pillows of his bed
a beautiful brown wicked-looking thing like some
velvet snake, who leaned over him as lie threw
down the painted cards upon the lace, and who had
cast about his throat her curved bare arm with the
great coils of dead gold all a-glitter on it.
And above it all there were odors of wines and
flowers, clouds of smoke, shouts of laughter, music
of shrill gay voices.
She stood like a frozen creature and saw-the
rosebuds in her hand. Then with a great piercing
cry she let the little roses fall, and turned and
fled. At the sound he looked up and saw her,
and shook his beautiful brown harlot off him with
an oath.
But Bebee flew down through the empty chambers and the long stairway as a hare flies from the
hounds; her tired feet never paused, her aching
limbs never slackened; she ran on and on, and on,




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


233


into the lighted streets, into the fresh night air;
on, and on, and on, straight to the river.
From its brink some man's strength caught and
held her. She struggled with it.
"Let me die! let me die!" she shrieked to him,
and strained from him to get at the cool gray
silent water that waited for her there.
Then she lost all consciousness, and saw the stars
no more.
When she came back to any sense of life, the
stars were shining still, and the face of Jeannot
was bending over her, wet with tears.
He had followed her to Paris when they had
missed her first, and had come straight by train to
the city, making sure it was thither she had come,
and there had sought her many days, watching for
her by the house of Flamen.
She shuddered away from him as he held her,
and looked at him with blank tearless eyes.
"Do not touch me-take me home."
That was all she ever said to him. She never
asked him  or told him anything. She never
noticed that it was strange that he should have
been here upon the river-bank.  Ile let her be,
and took her silently in the cool night back by the
iron ways to Brabant.


20*




CHAPTER XXVIII.
TIE sat quite still and upright in the wagon,
with the dark lands rushing by her. She
never spoke at all. She had a look that
frightened him upon her face. When he tried to
touch her hand, she shivered away from him.
The charcoal-burner, hardy and strong among
forest-reared men, cowered like a child in a corner,
and covered his eyes and wept.
So the night wore away.
She had no perception of anything that happened to her until she was led through her own
little garden in the early day, and her starling
cried to her "Bonjour, Bonjour!" Even then she
only looked about her in a bewildered way, and
never spoke.
Were the sixteen days a dream?
She did not know.
The women whom    Jeannot summoned, his
mother and sisters, and Mere Krebs, and one or
two others, weeping for what had been the hardness of their hearts against her, undressed her, and
laid her down on her little bed, and opened the
shutters to the radiance of the sun.
234




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


235


She let them do as they liked, only she seemed
neither to hear nor speak, and she never spoke.
All that Jeannot could tell was that he had found
her in Paris, and had saved her from the river.
The women were sorrowful, and reproached themselves. Perhaps she had done wrong, but they had
been harsh, and she was so young.
The two little sabots with the holes worn through
the soles touched them; and they blamed themselves for having shut their hearts and their doors
against her as they saw the fixed blue eyes, without
any light in them, and the pretty mouth closed
close against either sob or smile.
After all she was Bebee-the little bright blithe
thing that had danced with their children, and sung
to their singing, and brought them always the first
roses of the year. If she had been led astray, they
should have been gentler with her.
So they told themselves and each other.
What had she seen in that terrible Paris to
change her like this?-they could not tell. She
never spoke.
The cock crowed gayly to the sun. The lamb
bleated in the meadow. The bees boomed among
the pear-tree blossoms. The gray lavender blew
in the open house-door. The green leaves threw
shifting shadows on the floor.
All things were just the same as they had been
the year before, when she had woke to the joy of
being a girl of sixteen.
But Bebee now lay quite still and silent on her




236


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES,


little bed; as quiet as the waxen Gesu that they
laid in the manger at the Nativity.
" If she would only speak!" the women and the
children wailed, weeping sorely.
But she never spoke; nor did she seem to know
any one of them. Not even the starling, as he flew
on her pillow and called her.
" Give her rest," they all said; and one by one
moved away, being poor folk and hard-working,
and unable to lose a whole day.
Mere Krebs stayed with her, and Jeannot sat in
the porch where her little spinning-wheel stood,
and rocked himself to and fro; in vain agony,
powerless.
HIe had done all he could, and it was of no
avail.
Then people who had loved her, hearing, came
up the green lanes from the city-the cobbler and
the tinmtan, and the old woman who sold saints'
pictures by the Broodhuis. The Varnhart children
hung about the garden wicket, frightened and
sobbing. Old Jehan beat his knees with his hands,
and said only over and over again, "Another dead
-another dead!-the red mill and I see them all
dead!"
The long golden day drifted away, and the swans
swayed to and fro, and the willows grew silver in
the sunshine.
Beb6e, only, lay quite still and never spoke. The
starling sat above her head; his wings drooped,
and he was silent too.




TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


237


Towards sunset Bebee raised herself and called
aloud: they ran to her.
" Get me a rosebud-one with the moss round
it," she said to them.
They went out into the garden, and brought her
one wet with dew.
She kissed it, and laid it in one of her little
wooden shoes that stood upon the bed.
"Send them to him," she said wearily; "tell
him I walked all the way."
Then her head drooped; then momentary consciousness died out: the old dull lifeless look crept
over her face again like the shadow of death.
The starling spread his broad black wings above
her head. She lay quite still once more. The
women left the rosebud in the wooden shoe, not
knowing what she meant.
Night fell. Mere Krebs watched beside her.
Jeannot went down to the old church to beseech
heaven with all his simple, ignorant, tortured soul.
The villagers hovered about, talking in low sad
voices, and wondering, and dropping one by one
into their homes. They were sorry, very sorry;
but what could they do?
It was quite night. The lights were put out in
the lane. Jeannot, with Father Francis, prayed
before the shrine of the Seven Sorrows. MWre
Krebs slumbered in her rush-bottomed chair; she
was old and worked hard. The starling was
awake.
Bebee rose in her bed, and looked around, as




238


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SIfOES.


she had done when she had asked for the mossrosebud.
A senlse of unutterable universal pain ached over
all her body.
She did not see her little home, its four white
walls, its lattice shining in the moon, its wooden
bowls and plates, its oaken shelf and presses, its
plain familiar things that once had been so dear:she did not see thern;-she only saw the brown
woman with her arm about his throat.
She sat up in her bed and slipped her feet on to
the floor; the pretty little rosy feet that he had
used to want to clothe in silken stockings.
Poor little feet! she felt a curious compassion
for them;-they had served her so well, and they
were so tired.
She sat up a moment with that curious dull
agony, aching everywhere in body and in brain.
She kissed the rosebud once more, and laid it
gently down in the wooden shoe. She did not see
anything that was around her. She felt a great
dullness that closed in on her; a great weight that
was like iron on her head.
She thought she was in the strange, noisy, cruel
city, with the river close to her, and all her dead
dreams drifting down it like murdered children,
whilst that woman kissed him.
She slipped her feet on to the floor, and rose
and stood upright. There was a door open to the
moonlight-the door where she had sat spinning
and singing in a thousand happy days; the laven



TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


239


der blew; the tall, unbudded green lilies swayed
in the wind; she looked at them, and knew none
of them.
The night air drifted through her linen dress, and
played on her bare arms, and lifted the curls of
her hair; the same air that had played with her so
many times out of mind when she had been a little
tottering thing that measured its height by the red
rosebush. But it brought her no sense of where
she was.
All she saw was the woman who kissed him.
There was the water beyond; the kindly calm
water, all green with the moss and the nests of the
ouzels and the boughs of the hazels and willows,
where the swans were asleep in the reeds, and the
broad lilies spread wide and cool.
But she did not see any memory in it. She
thought it was the cruel gray river in the strange
white city; and she cried to it; and went out into
the old familiar ways, and knew none of them;
and ran feebly yet fleetly through the bushes and
flowers, looking up once at the stars with a helpless broken blind look, like a thing that is dying.
"IIe does not want me!" she said to them.
" Ie does not want me!-other women kiss him
there!"
Then with a low fluttering sound like a bird's
when its wings are shot, and yet it tries to rise, she
hovered a moment over the water, and stretched
her arms out to it.
" He does not want me!" she murmured; " he




240


TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES.


does not want me-and I am so tired.   Dear
God!"
Then she crept down, as a weary child creeps to
its mother, and threw herself forward, and let the
green dark waters take her where they had found
her amidst the lilies, a little laughing yearling
thing.
There she soon lay, quite quiet, with her face
turned to the stars, and the starling poised above
to watch her as she slept.
She had been only B6bee-the ways of God and
man had been too hard for her.
When the messengers of Flamen came that day,
they took him back a dead moss-rose and a pair of
little wooden shoes worn through with walking.
" One creature loved me once," he says to women
who wonder why the wooden shoes are there.


THE END.




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book of that class has presented a claim  "The boy, of whatever age, who takes
equally strong to take its place right  up this fascinating book, will scarcely lay
squarely up to it, and alongside. The  it down till finis or daylight appears."boys will all run to get it, and old boys,  Columbus yournal.
Buiwer's Novels. Library Edition. Comtlete in
forty-two volumes. Large type. 12MO. Cloth, $52.50; Library,,
sheep, $63; half calf, neat, $105; half calf, gilt extra, $115.50.
Each novel sold separately, as below, in cloth, at $i.25 per volume.


The Caxtons.......2 voIs.
My Novel...........4 voIS.
What will He do with It??..3 vols.
Devereux.........2 VOIs.
Last Days of Pompeii....2 vols.
Rienzi..........2 vols.
Leila, Calderon......ivol.
The Last of the Barons..2 vols.
Harold..........2 vols.
Pilgrims of the Rhine.... i vol.
Euigene Aramn......    2 volS.


Zanoni..........2 Vols.
Pelham.........2 vols.
The Disowned......2 Vols.
Paul Clifford.......2 Vols.
Godolphin........ivol.
Ernest Maltravers.....2 vole.
Alice..........2 vole.
Night and Morning....2 vole.
Lucretia.........2 vola.
A Strange Story......2 V01s.


"1This edition is in every way a desirable  purposes.... Book-buyers will do we.
onse for libraries; the volumes are of con-  to purchase this edition for their libraries.
veanien site, the type large, the paper of a  -Pittsburg, Gazette.
superior quality, and the lFinding neat and  " Every gentleman who desires to buil6
autwtantial."-Pkiladas. Inquirer,        up a complete library must have this selL
" Its convenient form makes it desirable  tion of Bulwer."-Columbus 7&surrxai
bw ua in traveling. as well as for library




PUBLICATIONS OF 7. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.
The American Beaver and his Works. By Lewis
H. MORGAN, author of "The League of the Iroquois."            Hand.
somely illustrated with twenty-three full-page Lithographs and
numerous Wood-Cuts. One vol. 8vo. Tinted paper. Cloth
extra, $5.
"The book may be pronounced an ex-  criptive treatise on the subject of which it
pansive and standard vork on the Ameri- treats, and will form a standard for those
can beaver, and a val able contribution to  who are seeking knowledge in this deKience."-N. Y. Herald.                partment of animal life.... By the pub'
" The book is an octavo of three hun-  lication of this book, Messrs. J. B. Lipdred and thirty pages, on very thick paper,  pincott & Co., of Philadelphia, have really
handsomely bound and abundantly illus-  done a service to science which we trust
trated with maps and diagrams. It is a com-  will be well rewarded "-Boston Even.
plete scientific, practical, historical and des-  Traveler.
The Autobiography of Dr. Benjamin Franklin.
The first and only complete edition of Franklin's Memoirs. Printed
from the original MS. With Notes and an Introduction. Edited
by the HON. JOHN BIGELOW, late Minister of the United States to
France. With Portrait from a line Engraving on Steel Large
I2mo. Toned paper. Fine cloth, beveled boards, $2.50.
"The discovery of the original auto-  completed it in a manner highly creditgraph of Benjamin Franklin's character-  able to his judgment and industry."-Thk
istic narrative of his own life was one of  New York Tribune.
the fortunate events of Mr. Bigelow's dip-  " Every one who has at heart the honor
lomatic career. It has given him the op-  of the nation, the interests of Am rican
portunity of producing a volume of rare  literature and the fame of Frankliu will
bibliographical interest, and performing a  thank the author for so requisite a national
valuable service to the cause of letters.  service, and applaud the manner and
He has engaged in his task with the en-  method of its fulfillment."-Boston Even.
thusiasm of an American scholar, and  Transcrifpt
The Dervishes.            History of the Dervishes; or,
Oriental Spiritualism. By JOHN P. BROWN, Interpreter of the
American Legation at Constantinople. With twenty-four Illuse
trations.  One vol. crown 8vo.    Tinted paper.   Cloth, $3.50.
" In this volume are the fruits of long... On the whole, this is a thoroughly
years of study and investigation, with a  original work, which cannot fail to begreat deal of personal observation. It  come a book of reference."-hTke Pkil/a.
treats, in an exhaustive manner, of the  Press.
belief and principles of the Dervishes.
New America. By Win. Hepworth Dixon. Fourth
edition. Crown 8vo. With Illustrations. Tinted paper. Extra
cloth, $2.75.
-(n this graphic volume Mr. Dixon I ly, vigorously and truthfully, under every
lklches American  enandwomensharp-    aspect."-Dubli University Magrauin




PUBLICATlONVS        OF 7. B. LIPPINCOTT         dr CO.
Dictionary of Daily Wants. A                   Cyclopcedia embracing nearlyr 200 pages of Sound Information upon all matters
of Practical and Domestic Utility, containing 980 Engravings. One
handsome I2mo vol.    Half Roxburgh, $3.75.
The "Dictionary of Daily Wants" may  channels, into one arrangement and sys
be said to have done for matters of Prac-  tem, by which they may be easily foun.
tical Utility in Domestic Affairs what the  and applied.
great naturalist Linnaeus did for the Sci-  The sale of nearly moo,ooo copies of thiv
ence of Botany. It has brought thou-  work affords the best evidence of its in
sands of useful items, scattered in dis-  trinsic value.
order through an unlimited number of
Dictionary of Useful Knowledge. A Book of
Reference upon History, Geography, Science, Statistics, etc., with
570 Engravings. A Companion Work to the "Dictionary of Daily
Wants." Two handsome 12mo vols., containing over 1500 pages
Half Roxburgh, $5.
Lizppincott's Treasuries of Literary Gems. Miniature 4to. Choicely printed on the finest toned paper and beautifully bound in extra cloth, gilt and gilt edges. 75 cts. each; as
follows:
I. A Treasury of Table Talk. II. Epigrams and Literary Follies.
III. A Treasury of Poetic Gems. IV. The Table Talk of Samuel
Johnson, LL. D. V. Gleanings from the Comedies of Shakspeare. VI.
Beauties of the British Dramatists. The six volumes in neat box, $4.50.
"A charming little series, well edited  is no padding in them: all is epigram,
and printed. More thoroughly readable  point, poetry or sound common sense."little books it would be hard to find: there  London Publishers' Circular.
Mizpah. Friends at Prayer. Containinga Prayer
or Meditation for each day in the Year. By LAFAYETTE C.
LOOMIS. I2mo. Beautifully printed on superfine tinted paper
within red lines. Fine cloth, $2. Extra cloth, gilt edges. $2.50.
This work proposes Morning and Even-  year  The Meditations are not exposi
uag Scripture Readings, and an Evening  tions of the text, but rather devotional
Meditation. The Morning Readings em-  reflections-generally upon the Evening
brace the Psalms twice, and the evening,  Reading -and intended to follow the
the New Testament entire, during the  Scripture and precede prayer.
The Wiefe's Messengers: A Novel. By Mrs. AM. B.
HORTON. Z2mo. Tinted paper. Extra cloth, $1.75.
"The writer has produced a capital con-  ligious feeling. The story is well worth
unbution to the cause of domestic truth,  reading on its own merits, and some poratd one which will be read with delight  tions of it are written with a real powem
i many a household." —Ohio Statesman.  that cannot fail to command attention." —
This story is pervaded by a strong re-  Philada. Evening Trmlegraji.




PUBLICATIONS OF 7. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.
Our Own Birds of the United States. A Familiar
Natural History of the Birds of the United States.     By WILLIAM
1. BAILY. Revised and Edited by Edward D. Cope, Member of
the Academy of Na 'ira Sciences.      With numerous Illustrationa
I6mo. Toned papel. Extra cloth, $1.50.
"The text is all the more acceptable to  rangement and system that will often make
the general reader because the birds are  it a helpful work of reference for older
called by their popular names, and not by  naturalists."-Phiiada. Even. Bulletin.
the scientific titles of the cyclopaedias, and  "To the youthful, 'Our Own Birds' is
we know them at once as old friends and  likely to prove a bountiful source of pleascompanions. We commend this unpre-    ure, and cannot fail to make them thortending little book to the public as pos-  oughly acquainted with the birds of the
sessing an interest wider in its range but  United States. As a science there is none
similar in kind to that which belongs to  more agreeable to study than ornithology.
Gilbert White's Natural History of Sel-  We therefore feel no hesitation in comborne."-N. Y. Even. Post.             mending this book to the public. It is
"The whole book is attractive, supply-  neatly printed and bound, and is profusely
ing much pleasantly-conveyed information  illustrated."-Nee York Heral
for young readers, and embodying an arA Few Friends, and How They Amused Themselves. A Tale in Nine Chapters, containing descriptions of Twenty
Pastimes and Games, and a Fancy-Dress Party. By M. E. DOxDG,
author of "Hans Brinker," &c.        I2mo. Toned paper.        Extra
cloth, $1.25.
' This convenient little encyclopaedia  or less intellectual, all provident of mirth.
strikes the proper moment most fitly. The  requiring no preparation, and capable ot
evenings have lengthened, and until they  enlisting the largest or passing off with the
again become short parties will be gath-  smallest numbers. The description is conered everywhere and social intercourse  veyed by examples that are themselves
will be general. But though it is compar-  'as good as a play.' The book deserves
atively easy to assemble those who would  a wide circulation, as it is the missionary
be amused, the amusement is sometimes  of much social pleasure, and demands no
replaced by its opposite, and more resem-  more costly apparatus than ready wit and
bles a religious meeting than the juicy en-  genial disposition." - Philada. VNrth
tertainment intended. The ' Few Friends'  A merican.
describes some twenty pastimes, all more
Cameos from English History. By the author of
'The Heir of Redclyffe," &c.        With marginal Index.       12mo,
Tinted paper. Cloth, $1.25; extra cloth, $1.75,
"History is presented in a very attractive  " An excellent design happily executed.
and interesting form for young folks in this -N. Y..Times.
work."-Pittsburg Gazette.
The Diamond Edition of the Poetical Works of
Robert Burns. Edited by REV. R. A. WILLMOTT. New edition,
With numerous additions. S8mo. Tinted paper. Fine cloth, Si.
This small, square, compact volume is  elegant and convenient, bringing the works
printed in clear type, and contains, in three  of one of the most popular of British p.'-eb
hnadred pages, the whole of Burns' poems,  within the means of every reader "-V_
with a glossary and index. It is cheap,  ton Even. TranscriP




PUBLICATIONS OF 7. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.


Agnes Wentworth.                A Novel. By E. Foxton,
author of "Herman," and "Sir Pavcn and Ste Pavon."             x2ma
Tinted paper. Extra cloth, $1.50.
"This is a very interesting and well-told  age of most of the novels issuing fiom tha
story. There is a naturalness in the group-  press."-Pittsburg Gazette.
ing of the characters, and a clearness of  "A novel which has the merit of being
definition, which make the story pleasant  written in graceful and clear style, while
aEd fascinating. Phases of life are also  it tells an interesting story."-The Inde
presented in terse and vigorous words....  fnennt.
It is high-toned and much above the averSiena. A Poem. By A. C. Swinburne. [Republished from Lippincott's Magazine.]   With Notes.     i6mo.   Tinted
paper. Paper covers, 25 cts.
"Is polished with great care, and is by  "One of the most elaborate as well as
far the best composition we can recall from  the most unexceptionable of his producSwinburne's pen, in more than one of its  tions."-N. Y. Evening Post.
effects."-Philada. North American.
Recollections of Persons and Places in the West.
By H. M. BRACKENRIDGE, a native of the West; Traveler, Author
Jurist. New edition, enlarged. I2mo. Toned paper. Fine cloth, $2.
"A very pleasant book it is, describing,  ingly full of interesting facts and anecin an autobiographical form, what was  dotes respecting a period of Western his'The West' of this country half a century  tory, which, when the rapid growth of the
ago."-Philada. Press.                 country is considered, may almost be called
"The writer of these 'Recollections'  Pre-Adamite."-Boston Evening Tranwas born in 1786, and his book is accord-  script.
Infelicia. A Volume of Poems. By Adah Isaacs
MENKEN. I6mo. Toned paper. Neat cloth, $i. Paper cover,
75 cts. With Portrait of Author, and Letter of Mr. Charles
Dickens, from a Steel Engraving. Fine cloth, beveled boards,
gilt top, $1.50.
"Some of the poems are forcible, others  with the living author's form, and it serves
are graceful and tender, but all are per-  to drape the unhappy life with the mantle
vaded by a spirit of sadness."-Washing-  of a proper human charity. For herein
ton Evening Star.                     are visible the vague reachings after and
"The volume is interesting, as reveal-  reminiscences of higher things."-Cining a something that lay beyond the vul-  cinnati Evening  hronicle.
gar eyes that took the liberty of license
Dallas Galbraith. A Novel. By Mrs. R. HardING DAVIS, author of "Waiting for the Verdict," "Margaret
Howth," "Life in the Iron Mills," &c.    8vo.   Fine cloth, $2.
"One of the best novels ever written for  equal or superior to any previous achieve
an American magazine. "-Philada. Morn-  ment. "-Philada. Evening Bulletin.
Post.                                 " We therefore seize the opportunity to
The story is most happily written in  say that this is a story of unusual power
Ill respects."-The North American.    opening so as to awaken interest. and
"As a specimen of her wonderful in-  maintaining the interest to the eud."teaity and passionate sympathies, this 'The National Baptist.
Gatained and wholly noble romance is




PUBLICA Ti ONS OF _7. B. LIPPZNCO TT & CO.
Beatrice. A Poem. By Hon. Roden Noel.
Square i6mo.     Tinted paper.    Extra cloth, gilt top, Si.
"It is impossible to read the poem      "Mr. Noel has a fruitful imagination,
through without bein& powerfully moved,  and such a thorough command of language
'ihere are passages iu it which for in-  as to link the heart and tongue in tha,
tensity and tenderness, clear and vivid  union from which only true postsy is born."
vision, spontaneous and delicate sympathy,  -N. 0. Times.
may be compared with the best efforts of  " Mr. Noel has no rival. He sings wit
our best living writers."-Loadons Sptec-  fai -like and subtle power." -Led.
tator.                                  Ate naasm.
Breaking a Butterfly; or, Blanche Ellersije's
Ending.    A   Novel.   By the author of "Guy Livingstone," &c.
Author's Edition. With Illustrations. 12nmo. Extra cloth, $1.50.
Paper cover, 5o cts.'
"It is a charming story of English life, gifted author's most captivating vein. ~and marked by the well-known character-  Philada. Age'.
stics of the author's style, in which the  " It is a story which every one will find
gorgeous descriptions of manhood are pro-  interesting; and it is written with an easy
dominant. "-Buftaio Exp~ress.    -      grace indicative of good taste and large ex" It is intensely interesting, full of life perience. "-A lbany.7,urnal.
ind spirit, and throughout is written in the
The Voice in Siniging. From the German of
Emma Seiler. New edition. Revised and enlarged. 12mo.
Extra cloth. Ornamented. $1.50.
"We would earnestly advise all inter-   " This remarkable book is of special
ested in any way in the vocal organs to  interest to teachers and scholars of vocal
read and thoroughly digest this remarkable  music. It is, however, of value to that
work."-Boston Musical Times.            much larger number of persons who love
"1It is meeting with the favor of all our  music for its own sake. Here, almost for
authorities, and is a very valuable work.  the first time in English, and certainly for
To any one engaged in teaching cultivation  the first time in an American book, we,)f the voice, or making singinf, a study, it have a satisfactory explanation of the phywill prove an efficient assistant '-Loomis'  siology and Esthetics of ilie art divine." -
Musical.7ournal                        Pladda. North A merican.
Abraham          Page, Esq. "Life and Op/inions of
Abraham    Page, Esq.    12.mo.   Tinted paper.    Fine cloth, $1.50.
"It is really refreshing, in these days of of a gentleman, and the grace and ciature
sensational stuff, to fall upon a book like  of a scholar.-Baltimore Leader.
this, written with the easy, wvell-bred air
What I Know about Ben Eccies. A Novel. By
ABRAHAm PAGE, author of "The Life and Opinions of Abraham
Page, Esq." 12MO. Cloth, $1.5o.
"Quite a pathetic story, which, without  sationsal, will enchain the attention to thu
being at all of the kind lenoininated sea- Ivery cloae."-Pittsburg Ev..7ourua&




PUBLICA TIOVS OF J. B. LIPPFNC'OTT & CO.
Advice to a Wife on the MAanagement of her owls
Health, and on the Treatment of some of the Complaints incidental
to Pregnancy, Labor and Suckling; with an Introductory Chapter
especially addressed to a Young Wife. By PYE HENRY CHAVASSE,
M.D. Eighth edition, revised. i6mo. Neatly bound in cloth. $I.5o0
From this advice any woman may     doctor's lore is given in the style of plain
other some precious ideas as to the care  modern conversation."-Philada. Elvez.
of her health. The manual is very popu-  Bu,'letin.
lar in England, where it has passed through  "Possesses undoubted value for those
eight rapid editions, and we know of no  to whom it is addressed."-Chicago n 7ourbimilar work where an equal amount of  nal.
Advice to a Mlothcr on the AManagement of her
Children, and on the Treatment on the moment of some of their
more pressing Illnesses and Accidents. By PYE IHENRY CHAVASSE,
M.D. Ninth edition, revised. i6mo. Neatlybound in cloth. $1.50.
"For such, and for those who want to  and has undergone a careful revision by
rear children judiciously, but need proper  Sir Charles Locock, the first physiciancounsel, the present volume is one of the  accoucheur to Queen Victoria." -.Y
most valuable treatises ever published.  Even. Post.
The new edition contains many new notes,
Counsel to a Mother: Being a Continuation and
the Completion of "Advice to a Mother."            By PYE    HENRY
CHAVASSE, M.D., author of "Advice to a Wife," etc. I6mo.
Fine cloth. $I.
This invaluable work treats of the following subjects:
PART I.-INFANCY: Preliminary Conversation; Ablution; Navel Rupture; Diet;
Wet-Nurse; Vaccination; Exercise; Sleep; The Bladder and Bowels.
PART II.-CHILDHOOD: Ablution; Clothing; Diet; The Nursery; Exercise;
Amusement; A Poem on Childhood; Education; Sleep; The Hair of a Child.
PART III.-YOUTH: Ablution; Management of Hair; Whitening the Skin;
Clothing; Diet; Air and Exercise; Amusements; Education; Household Work for
Girls; Teeth and Gums; Sleep.
"Simple, practical, intelligible."-Phil-  any woman, and especially if she be a
adelthia Evening Bulletin.           mother, to read it through at one sitting,
" It is full of sound, practical common  and thereafter to retain it always for consense."-The Household.                sultation and advice. We are more than
" There is a quiet simplicity and attrac-  pleased with it."-St. Louis Times.
tiveness about the book which will induce
Maternal Management of Infancy. For the use
of Parents. By F. H. GETCIIELL, M.D. I6mo. Cloth. 75 cents.
"We warmly recommend it for its good  " This little work is deserving the caresense, clearness and brevity."- ihe t'hila.  ful attention of all entrusted with the
Press.                                management of infants."-The Inquire.
Dictionary of Medical and Surgical Knowledge,
and Complete Practical Guide in Health and Diseases, for Families.
With I40 Engravings. One handsome 12mo vol. of 755 pages.
Half Roxburgh, $2.50.
The Editor of this volume has brought  professiona. study, to the task of prepw
ihe experience of more than thirty years  mg this work.
f active practice, and overforty years of




FUBLICA TZONS OF _7. B. LIP-PINCOTT & CO.
GOOD BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS.
Deetp Down. A Tale of/the Cornish Mines. By
R. M. BALLANTYNE, author of "Fighting the Flames," "1Silvei
Lake," etc. With Illustrations. Globe edition. I2mo. Fine
cloth. $1.50.
"Deep Down' can be recommended as   very ittle is generally known. The book
a story of exciting interest, which boys will  is enbellished with a number of very exeagerly read, and whsich wilt give some  cellent designs."-Phiiiada. Even. Televaluable ideas on a subject about which  grqth.
Fighting the Flames. A Tale of/the Fire Brigade.
By R. M. BALLANTYNE,, author of "Silver Lake," "The Coral
Islands," etc. With Illustrations. Globe edition. i2mo. Fine.c
cloth. $1.5o.
"An interesting and spirited little work."-Phiiada. Even. Telegrak.
Erling the Bold. A Tale of the Nzorse Sea-Kings.
By R. M. BALLANTYNE, author of "1Fighting the Flames," "1Deep
Down," etc.    Globe edition.    With   Illustrations.  I2mo.    Extra
cloth. $t.5o.
"It is a bold and stirring tale of the old  lent description of the manners and cusNorse royers who conquered and settled in  toms of the rugged race who inhabited the
England at various times between the fifths  North of Europe at the dawn of modern
and eleventls ceisturies. The narrative is  history."-phiiada. Telegrafik.
interesting of itself, and it gives an excelSilver Lake; or, Lost in the Snow. By R. Af.
BALLANTYNE, author of " The Wild Man of the West," " Fighting
the Flames," etc.      With   Illustrations.  Square 12mo.     Tinted
paper. Extra cloth. $1.25.
"We heartily recommend the book, and  heart will receive on its perusal." —TAs
tan imagine the pleasure many a young IEclectic Review.
F'orty —Four Years of a Hunter's Life. Being
Reminiscences of Meshach Browning, a Maryland Hunter. With
numerous Illustrations. Globe edition. I2mo. Fine cloth. $1.5o.
"It portrays the made of life of the  overcome them. It is a book which will
early settlers, the dangers they encount-  be read with the greatest avidity by thouered, and all the difficulties they had to  sands in all sections of tite country."contend with, and how   successfully a  Bail. A mnerican.
strong arm and a courageous heart could
Moody Mike; or, The Power of Love. A Christmas Story.     By FRANK      SEWALL.     Illustrated.   i6mo.    Extra
cloth.  $ti.
Mhs is a story intended for the young  and beautifully bound.  It is also illus
folks. It is publishi~d in a manner at  trated with several full-page engravinn,~
one neat sod attractive, being well pninted Iwhich impart to it additional attractions..




PUBLICATIONS OF 7. B. LIPI'NCOTT & CO.


GOOD BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS.
Man Upon the Sea; or, A History of Maritizle
Adventure, Exploration and Discovery from the Earliest Ages to
the Present Time. With numerous Engravings. By FRANK B.
GOODRICH, author of " The Court of Napoleon," etc. 8vo. Cloth.
$2.25.
" It is a delightful work, brilliant with  more agreeable in style or more fascinatdeeds of valiant enterprise and heroic en-  ing in interest."-Boston Jrournal.
durance, inj varied by every conceivable  " The book will be warmly welcomed
incident. We have seldom seen a work   by young people."-Boston Post.
Old Deccan Days; or, Hindoo Fairy Legends
Current in Southern India. Collected from oral tradition by M.
FRERE With an Introduction and Notes by Sir Bartle Frere.
Globe edition. i2mo. Illustrated. Fine cloth. $1.50.
"This little collection of Hindoo Fairy  writers of English possess, but which,
Legends is probably the most interesting  when it belongs to a lady, is the best and
book extant on that subject..     The  most attractive in the world."-N. Y.
stories of this little book are told in a very  Tines.
lively and agreeable style-a style few
Fuz-Buz and Mother Grabem. The Wonderful
Stories of Fuz-Buz the Fly and Mother Grabem          the Spider.   A
Fairy Tale.     Handsomely    Illustrated.   Small 4to.   Cloth.   $I.
Extra cloth, gilt top. $1.25.
"Laughable stories comically illustrated  little boys and girls. Get it for the holifor little folks. The very book to delight  days."-Pittsburg Chronicle.
Casella; or, The Children of the Valleys.                             By
MARTHA FARQVHARSON, author of" Elsie Dinsmore," etc. i6mo.
Cloth. $t.50.
"It is rich in all that is strong, generous  "A lively and interesting story, based
and true."-Bait. Episc. -Methodist.    upon the sufferings of the pious Walden" The story is one of the most interest-  ses, and is well written and life-like."ing in ecclesiastical history."-The Metho-  Boston Christian Era.
dist.
Trees, Plants and Flowers: Where and How
they Grow.    By WILLIAM L. BAIIY, author of." Our Own Birds,"
etc. With seventy-three Engravings. i6mo. Toned paper. Extra
cloth. $.
" In the compass of less than a hundred  book generally in the Fands of the little
and fifty pages Mr. Baily gives us 'a  folks; it is written so clearly and pleas
familiar history of the vegetable kingdom,'  antly that they will take to it readily. But
popularly and interestingly written, well  there are many grown folks also whc
arranged, and containing much valuable  would be glad to know something more
information and many interesting facts.  of botany than they do, but who have
He is entitled to great thanks for the  neither time nor inclination for ponderous
work he is doing in aiding the develop-  technical and scientific volumes. To these
ment of a taste for and interest in natural  also we can heartily commend Mr. Bailvt
nistory  We should be glad to see this  book."-N. Y. Even. Mail.




PUBLICATIONS OF 7. B. LIPPINCOTT &- CO.
VALUABLE BOOKS FOR THE FARM.
The    Farmers' and       Planters' Encyclopedia          of
Rural Affairs. Illustrated by numerous Engravings of Animals,
Implements and other subjects interesting to the Agriculturist. By
CUTHBERT W. JOHNSON, ESQ., F. R S., etc.   Adapted to the
United States by GOUVERNEUR EMERSON. A new and revised
edition. One vol. royal 8vo. Strongly bound. Price $6.
The Illustrated Horse Doctor: Being an accurate
and detailed account of the various Diseases to which the Equine
Race are subjected; together with the latest mode of treatment
and all the requisite prescriptions, written in plain English. Accompanied by more than 400 Pictorial Representations. By EDWARD MAYHEW, M. R. C. V. S. Tinted paper. 8vo. Cloth. $3.
The Illustrated      Horse Management: Containing
Descriptive Remarks upon Anatomy, Medicine, Shoeing; Teeth,
Food, Vices, Stables; likewise a plain account of the Situation,
Nature and Value of the Various Points; together with comments
on Grooms, Dealers, Breeders, Breakers and Trainers. Also on
Carriages and Harness. Embellished with more than 400 Engravings. By EDWARD MAYHEW, M. R. C. V. S. Tinted paper. 8vo.
Cloth. $3.
Sorghum     and its Products.       An account of recent
investigations concerning the Value of Sorghum in Sugar Production; together with a description of a New Method of Making Sugar
and Refined Syrup from this Plant. Adapted to common use. By
F. L. STEWART. I2mo. Cloth. $I.50.
A  Practical Treatise on the Hive and Honey-Bee.
By L. L. LANGSTROTH. With an Introduction by REV. ROBERT
BAIRD, D. D. Revised and illustrated with 77 Engravings.  2mo.,
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Litpincotf's Pronouncing Gazetteer Containss:
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V.-An Elaborate Introduction, explanatory of the Principles of Pro.
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A MAGNIFICENT WORK.
A CRITICAL DICTIONARY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
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BRITISH AND AMERICAN AUTHORS,
LIVING AND DECEASED.
From the Earliest Accounts to the Latter Half of the Nineteenth Century. Containing over Forty-six Thousand Articles (Authors), with
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