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"Oh! I believe you you are very brave; but coward me prefers spring to winter. Oh! the spring, Madame Martial, the spring! when the leaves burst forth; when the pretty wood-flowers blossom, which smell so good so good, that the air is perfumed.
Around the basin were gathered companies of such wood-flowers as love the water, conspicuous among which, both for number and beauty, were the yellow and orange blossoms of the elegant "jewels," as boys call them.
Georges, the baker, whose fiddle made merry melody at all the village dances, played before them tunefully; little children, with their hands full of wood-flowers, ran before them; his old blind poodle smelt its way faithfully by their footsteps; their priest led the way upward with the cross held erect against the light; Reine Allix walked beside them, nearly as firmly as she had trodden the same road seventy years before in her own bridal hour.
She stepped on deep rugs of yellow goat skins, and, glancing at the windows on either side, she opened the door. Outside it lay a porch with a railing, but no roof. On each post stood a box filled with yellow wood-flowers and trailing vines of pale green. A big tree rising through one corner of the floor supplied the cover.
And when the tenth chime of the distant village clock is floating on the breeze, though it reaches not your cabin when the falling dew, now almost a shower, has bathed the leaves, with rain chilling their fibres when the bluebells and the foxgloves and all the wood-flowers rest upon their stems when the songsters of the grove, with heads comfortably tucked under their warm wings, sleep soundly in their nests, or in the angles of the branches when the young fawns, lost in some wild ravine, bleat for their mothers whom they never will see more; and the gorged wolves, their muzzles red with blood, are stretched snoring in their dens and lurking-places then it is the heavy boars, shaking off their laziness, leave their sombre retreats take to the open country, and trotting, grunting, and with hesitating footsteps, come and plunge their awkward and heavy bodies in the marshy waters, and wallow in the soft mud.
Some of them watch above the flower-roots, and keep them fresh and strong; others gather the clear drops that trickle from the damp rocks, and form a little spring, which, growing ever larger, rises to the light above, and gushes forth in some green field or lonely forest; where the wild-birds come to drink, and wood-flowers spread their thirsty leaves above the clear, cool waves, as they go dancing away, carrying joy and freshness wherever they go.
I can see her now, standing under the budding branches of the grey trees, over which a tinge of green seemed to be deepening day after day, her sun-bonnet fallen back on her neck, her hands full of delicate wood-flowers, quite unconscious of my gaze, but intent on sweet mockery of some bird in neighbouring bush or tree.
The morning was delicious, so full of snap and sunshine that it set him to dancing and skipping as he went along. All the wood-flowers were as wide awake as he. They nodded at Archie, as if saying "Good-morning," and sent out fresh smells into the air.
After many wanderings, he came at length to a great forest, and here beside a still lake he stayed to rest. Delicate wood-flowers grew near him in the deep green moss, with drooping heads, as if they listened to the soft wind singing among the pines. Bright-eyed birds peeped at him from their nests, and many-colored insects danced above the cool, still lake.
When evening comes the sun's last smiles reach far into the timber and linger lovingly on the boles of the trees with a tender beauty. Wood-flowers face the vanishing light and hold it until the scalloped edges of the oak leaves etched against the sky have been blurred by the gathering darkness. Long streams of cinnabar and orange flare up in the western sky.
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