Page:A Picture-book without Pictures and Other Stories (1848).djvu/79



The Moon told me as follows:—There lie two peasants’ cottages by the road through the wood. The doors are low, and the windows are irregular, but all around them grow buckthorn and barberries; the roof is mossy and grown over with yellow-flowered stonecrop and houseleek; nothing but cabbages and potatoes grow in the little garden, but there grows in the hedge an elder-tree, and under this sate a little girl; and there she sate with her brown eyes riveted upon an old oak tree between the houses. This tree has a tall and decayed hole, the top of it is sawn off, and there the stork has built his nest; there he stood and clattered with his beak.