more than a hundred years as the convent of the "White Ladies", with its
four long galleries, one above the other, looking proudly down upon the
humbler dwellings of the village. On the side of the house, where ran the
broad road from Rouen to Darnetal, a high rugged wall surrounded a wide
yard, guarded at the entrance by two massive doors, studded with enormous
spikes. The naked barrenness of this yard was, to say the least, forbidding
in the extreme; but the fertile fields on the other side of the house
spread themselves like a vast and beautiful green carpet, dotted here and
there with little villages, crowned with church spires and their
corresponding belfries, from which on a Sunday morning pealed out the
cheerful call to prayer and worship. The ancient convent long before our
story begins had been transformed into a lovely dwelling with an immense
garden on one side, edged by a dozen little brick houses that seemed so
small that they made us children think of certain doll-houses that we used
to see in the Paris magazines. They were known locally as the "Red
Cottages." A long avenue of ancient elms separated us from these houses of
our neighbors, and in front of the cottages stretched a line of stone
benches, where, in the shade of the great trees, the old men of the village
used to sit and recount to us tales of the days when the Convent
flourished. Some of these stories made us shiver. (Indeed, they had a habit
of straying into our dreams at night.)

The rest of the land around the Convent had, with the passing of the years,
fallen into the hands of the villagers themselves. Each one had a small
space for flowers in front and a vegetable garden behind.

Of course, our own garden covering the whole space in front of the Red
Cottages, was a much more pretentious affair with its deep well, its
many-colored kiosks, and its noisy bee-hives. In fact, it was in our eyes,
the most enchanting corner of the earth.