thing beloved.

So Bébée 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, "Bébée, Bébée--bonjour, bonjour." These were all
the words it knew. It said the same words a thousand times a week. But
to Bébée 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, "How good it is to live when one
is young!"

Old people say the same thing often, but they sigh when they say it.
Bébée smiled.

Mère Krebs opened her door in the next cottage, and nodded over the wall.

"What a fine thing to be sixteen!--a merry year, Bébée."