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 Bébée, and she went to sleep every night in the
firm belief that the sixteen little angels of the Flemish prayer kept
watch and ward over her bed. For the rest, being poetical, as these north
folks are not, and having in her--wherever 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-à-brac shops and the fruit