Page:Love's trilogy.djvu/337

 'GOD'S PEACE* 327

'It is the fruit harvest time. In the miller's garden stands his daughter, the high-bosomed maid, with her arms full of luxuriant grapes.'

OCTOBER.

IN the well-garden, which lies between the town XXI and Rough-Hill, the tiny babies have their playground. When the weather is fine they are taken there by mothers, nurses or maids, either riding in their cradle carriages, or tripping on their stumpy legs. A large, circular space, shaded by big trees, and surrounded by long benches, forms the meeting-place. Here there is built a small wooden booth, from which is sold milk and biscuits, liquorice, carob-bean and tempting red-striped sugar-sticks. In the middle of the place stands a forbidding-looking bronze statue of a patriotic hero who looks on with unmoved severity.

On our way to the town Greta and I often pass through the well-garden. For me it means a revival of my very earliest memories from the time I was an impressionable little soul who, in anger, put out my tongue at the wind, and wept with fear every time my nurse-maid, according to the frank custom of the garden, took me to perform a very natural errand at the feet of the warlike general. But first and foremost I enjoy watching Greta's delight over the children. With radiant eyes she follows their gracefully clumsy tumblings about, and she finds them equally fascinating whether they are chattering and laughing, or whether they