They see what others can never guess, they hear what we cannot hear,
And the loathly dragons that waste our life they never learn to fear.
The little inn at the Sign of the Rose,--ah, who can forget the place
Where Titania danced with the children small and lent them her elfin
grace?
And wherever they go and whatever they do in the years that turn them
gray
They never forget the charm she said when she stole their hearts away!
XVII
THE GARDENS OF HELENE
"Is there not any saint of the kitchen, at all?" asked the serious-eyed
little demoiselle sorting herbs under the pear-tree. Old Jacqueline,
gathering the tiny fagots into her capacious apron, chuckled wisely.
"There should be, if there isn't. Perhaps the good God thinks that the
men will take care that there are kitchens, without His help." She
hobbled briskly into the house. Helene sat for a few minutes with hands
folded, her small nose alert as a rabbit's to the marvelous blend of
odors in the hot sunshiny air.
It was a very agreeable place, that old French garden. There had been a
kitchen-garden on that very spot for more than five hundred years; at
least, so said Monsieur Lescarbot the lawyer, and he knew all about the
history of the world. A part of the old wall had been there in the days
of the First Crusade, and the rest looked as if it had.
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