and in tears as wild as her laughter. As the girl grew in health and
stature, she tried, tenderly, strenuously, to discipline the sensitive
nature, bursting her heart with grief at times because she knew that
these high feelings and delicate powers came through a long line of
ancestral tendencies, as indestructible as perilous and joyous.

Four things were always apparent in the girl's character: sympathy with
suffering, kindness without partiality, a love of nature, and an intense
candour.

Not a stray cat wandering into the Place du Vier Prison but found an
asylum in the garden behind the cottage. Not a dog hungry for a bone,
stopping at Guida's door, but was sure of one from a hiding-place in the
hawthorn hedge of the garden. Every morning you might have seen the
birds in fluttering, chirping groups upon the may-tree or the lilac-
bushes, waiting for the tiny snow-storm of bread to fall from her hand.
Was he good or bad, ragged or neat, honest or a thief, not a deserting
sailor or a homeless lad, halting at the cottage, but was fed from the
girl's private larder behind the straw beehives among the sweet lavender
and the gooseberry-bushes. No matter how rough the vagrant, the
sincerity and pure impulse of the child seemed to throw round him a
sunshine of decency and respect.

The garden behind the house was the girl's Eden. She had planted upon
the hawthorn hedge the crimson monthly rose, the fuchsia, and the
jonquil, until at last the cottage was hemmed in by a wall of flowers;
and here she was ever as busy as the bees which hung humming on the sweet
scabious.

In this corner was a little hut for rabbits; in that, there was a hole