Page:A Leaf in the Storm.djvu/96

 was not in me: it would have seemed to me peevish, childish, ingrate, mean.

This was my ignorance, no doubt. Men, I have noticed, knowing much, do envy much—almost always.

One day in the early spring-time, I came with my troop into a little town that stood on the Loire River—a little old, gray town, high on a rock, circled by crumbling walls, all blossoming everywhere just then with bud and leaf, all over its moat and its ramparts, in its streets and its casements: its very ditches were white with lilies-of-the-valley, and its very roofs were yellow with flowering houseleeks, while at every nook and corner over the walls of its gardens the lilacs, white and purple, were in bloom. I can smell them now: in the ditch that they will bury me in, I shall smell them still, I think.

We entered the gates at high noon, and set up our play-house in the market-square.

The morrow would be a fête-day, and the town was stirred from the gray torpor and stillness of its extreme old age, and was alive and gay with country-people and its own small population, all afoot and thronging the wooden stalls of the fair, and the crooked steep alleys that crossed and recrossed each other up the slope of the place.