be worth?"




A LEAF IN THE STORM, By Ouida

The Berceau de Dieu was a little village in the valley of the Seine.
As a lark drops its nest among the grasses, so a few peasant people had
dropped their little farms and cottages amid the great green woods on
the winding river. It was a pretty place, with one steep, stony street,
shady with poplars and with elms; quaint houses, about whose thatch a
cloud of white and gray pigeons fluttered all day long; a little aged
chapel with a conical red roof; and great barns covered with ivy and
thick creepers, red and purple, and lichens that were yellow in the sun.
All around it were the broad, flowering meadows, with the sleek cattle
of Normandy fattening in them, and the sweet dim forests where the young
men and maidens went on every holy day and feast-day in the summer-time
to seek for wood-anemones, and lilies of the pools, and the wild
campanula, and the fresh dog-rose, and all the boughs and grasses
that made their house-doors like garden bowers, and seemed to take the
cushat's note and the linnet's song into their little temple of God.

The Berceau de Dieu was very old indeed. Men said that the hamlet had
been there in the day of the Virgin of Orleans; and a stone cross of the
twelfth century still stood by the great pond of water at the bottom
of the street under the chestnut-tree, where the villagers gathered to
gossip at sunset when their work was done. It had no city near it, and
no town nearer than four leagues. It was in the green care of a pastoral
district, thickly wooded and intersected with orchards. Its produce of