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."

Bébée 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 somersaults 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 lifelong neighbor and gossip of Antoine's; he
had been a day laborer in these same fields all his years, and had never
travelled farther than where the red mill-sails turned among the colza
and the corn.

"Come in, my pretty one, for a second," he whispered, with an air of
mystery that made Bébée's heart quicken with expectancy. "Come in; I have