Bebee

at under the yellow aw

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 pe

ked wistfully over the throng, and did not find what they

ver full of a thousand stories that they would not t

work, and whose head was always full of fancies, even in the grimmest winter time, when she wove the lace in the gray,

ittance they gained, and the young women sighed for their aching heads and their failing eyesight, and the

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 wonde

t she was not ungrateful; and she had a little moss-rose ready, with a sprig of sweetbrier, and a tiny spray of m

ould hav

. There was only the moss-rose in her basket, and the red

colored, quaintly fashioned street

e 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 ZuyderZee, and the

al flags flying, and their tall masts standing thick as grass, and their tawny sails flapping

give her a shell or a plume of seaweed, and try and make her understand what the wonderful wild water was like, which was not quiet and sluggish and dusky as this canal was, but was forever changing and moving, and c

these ships 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 s

the sailors' tales; she saw the masts and the bits of bunting that stream

in the roof, where one square unglazed hole that served for light looked out upon the canal, with all its crowded craft, from the dainty schooner yacht, fresh as gilding and holystone could mak

cap, who sat against the window, and pricked out lace patterns with a pin on thick

them for you. They are the first currants we have seen this year. Me? oh, for me, I have eaten more than are good! You

h, took the currants, and smiled with a childish glee, and began to

mother of your own, my l

ould have been

e the fanciful lily parentage of Antoine's stories. "How much work have you done, Annémie? Oh, all

d that cannot be. But I am afraid my eyes a

hem if they were not? You know he is one

But I am always afraid of my eyes. I do not s

en I have been sitting all day in the place in the light, the flo

oung girl laughed toget

ttle one," said old Annémie. "Th

y the room

I have not much time, you see; and som

e, 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 flower-beds. Will you never change your mind, and live with me, An

nd 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 sunny blue eyes. Only one day in winter, when the great blocks of ice were smashing hither and thither, a coaster came in and brought tidings of how off in the Danish waters they had come on a water-logged 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 on her stern there was her name painted white, the 'Fleur d'Epine,' of Brussels, as plain as name could be; and 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 know my man is dead. Any day-

ferent words, but always the same little tale, and she knew how old Annémie was deaf to all the bells that tolled the time, and blind to all

palsied hand the square of canvas that screened the casement, and looked out, with her old dim sad eyes straine

that? It must be so terrible, and yet it must be

stairs for a metal cruche full of water, and set over a little charcoal on t

ill looking out of the hole in the wall on

s twi

houting to each other. The craft were crowded close, and lost in the growing

ray air. "It used to fly there,-one could see it coming up half a mile off,-just a pale yellow flake on the wind, like a tress of my hair, he would sa

shaking hand and took up the lace patterns an

e said that she had never been quite right in her brain since that fatal winter noon sixty years

that, nor heed whether he

place, Bébée 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 Anném

er basket, and trotted home, her

nd by some vague association of thought that she could not have

quite