Waterbury evening Democrat., 1889-02-20

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 CHAPTER l.
 Bebee sprang out of bed at daybreak. She was 16
 It seemed to be a very wonderful thing to be as much as that-16-a woman quite.
 A cock was growing under her lattice He said how old you arel-how old you are!- every time he sounded his clarion.
 She opened the lattice and wished him good day, with laugh. It was so pleasant to be woke by him and to think that no one in all the world could ever call one a child any more.
 There was kid bleating in the shed. There was thrush singing in the dusk of the sycamore leaves. There was calf lowing to its mother away there beyond the fence. There were dreamy 1nuffled bells ringing in the distance from many steeples and belfries where the city was; they all said one thing: 'How good it is to be so old as that-how good, how very good!"
 Bebee was very pretty.
 No one ill all Brabant ever denied that. To look at her it seemed if she had so lived among the flowers that she had grown like them, and only looked Q bigger blossom that was all.
 She wore two little wooden shoes and a little cotton cap, and gray kirtle-linen in 
 the shoes were like rose leaves, and the cap was as white as lily, and the gray kirtle was like the bark of the bough that the apple blossom parts, and peeps out of, to blush in the sun.
 The flowers had been the only godmothers she had ever had and fairy godmothers, too. The marigolds and the sunfowers had given her their ripe, rich gold to tint her hair; the lupins and irises had lent their azure to her l.. ln mouth; the arum lilies had uncurled their softness for her skin, and the lime blossoms had given her their frank, fresh, innocent fragrance.
 The winds had blown, and the rains had rained, and the sun had shone on her, indeed, and had warmed the whiteness of her limbs, but they had only given to her body and her soul hardy, breeze blown freshness like that i of field cowslip.
 She had never been called anything but Bebee.
 One summer day Antoine Maes-a French subject but Belgian by adoption and habit, an old man who got his meager living by till | ing the garden plot about his hut and selling flowers in the city squares-Antoine, going into Brussels for his day's trade, had seen a gray bundle floating among the water lilies in the bit of water near his hut and had hooked it out to land, and found a year old child in it, left to drown no doubt, but saved by the lilies, and laughing gleefully at fate. Some lace worker, blind with the pain of toll, or some peasant woman harder of heart than the oxen in her yoke, had left it there to drift away to death, not reckoning for the inward ripple of the current or toughness of | the lily leaves and stems. 1 Old Antoine took it to his wife, and the wife, childless and aged sou1 begged leave | to keep it; and the two poor lonely, simple | folks grew to care for the homeless, mother less thing, and they and the people about all called it Bebee-only Bebee.
 The church got ct it and added to it saints name; but for all its little world it re- mained Bebee-Bebee when it trotted no higher than the red carnation heads-Bebee when its yellow curls touched as high as the lavender bush-Bebee on this proud day when the thrushs song and the cocks crow found l her 16 years old
 Old Antoine's hut stood ill little patch of garden ground with brier hedge all round it, in that byway which lies between Laeken and Brussels, in the heart of fiat, green Bra bant, where there are beautiful meadows and tall, Towering hedges, and forest trees and fern filled ditches, and little piece of water, deep and cool, where the swans sail all day long, and the snvery willows dip and l sway with the wird.
 
 lies today, and all the place brims over with grass, and boughs, and blossoms, and flower ing beans, and wild dog roses; and there are | few cottages and cabins there near the pretty water, and farther there is an old church, sacred to St. Guido; and beyond go the green level country and the endless wheat fields, and the old mills with their red sails against the sun; and beyond all these the pale blue, sea like horizon of the plains of Flanders
 I It was a pretty little hut, pink all over like a sea shell, in the fashion that the Neither flanders love; and its two little square lattices were dark with creeping plants and big rose bushes, and its roof, so low that you could touch 1t, was golden and green with all the Echens and stoneworts that are known on earth.
 Here Bebee grew from year to year; and soon learned to be big enough and hardy enough to tie up punches of stocks and pinks for the market, and then to carry @ basket for herself, trotting by Antoine's side along the green roadway and into the white, wide streets; and in the market the buyers-most often of all when they were young mothers would seek out the little golden head and ] the beautiful frank blue eyes, and buy Be bees lilies and carnations whether they wanted them or not. So that old Macs used to cross himself and say that, thanks to Om Lady, trade was thrice as stirring since the little one had stretched out her rosy fingers
 with the flowers.
 All the same, however stirring trade might be in summer, when the long winters cam, and the Montague de la Cour was a sharI } slope of ice, and the pinnacles of St. Gudult were all frosted white with snow, and the hoi house flowers alone could fill the market, anG the country gardens were bitter black wint swept desolations where the chilly roots hud dled themselves together under ground, ik homeless children in cellar, then the money
 gained in the time of leaf and blossom was al "G ~ ""