CHAPTER I

A GARDEN GROWS

“Il y a dans ce village Une enfant a l’œil noir. C’est Jeanne au frais visage; Elle chant matin et soir. Elle est rieuse et belle, Et dans nos environs Tout le monde l’appelle La fillette au chansons. Tra la la--”

sang Lucie as she sat on a stone bench under a sheltering cherry tree. The “tra la la” suddenly ceased at a stir of the branches on the other side. Lucie glanced up with a twinkle in her eyes and changed the song to “Way down upon the Swanee river.”

“Lucie, Lucie, what are those funny words you sing?” called some one from over the wall.

“_Ma foi_, what ignorance!” returned Lucie with an uplift of her eyebrows. “As if one could not tell. Did you never hear ‘the Old Folks at Home’?”

“What is this ‘Ole folk zat ome?’ I do not know,” returned the voice.

Lucie laughed. “Come over, come over, Annette, and I will teach it to you. It will be droll to hear you sing it.”

Annette climbed nimbly to the top of the stone wall, and presently dropped to her feet, avoiding bushes and vines in order to make her way to where Lucie was sitting. “It is droll enough to hear you sing it,” she remarked. “It is in English of course.”

“American English; a song my mother often sings and which every one knows over there in the United States.”

“And you will teach it to me, this song? I shall like to sing it for grandfather. How he will be amused when he hears it.”

“Then repeat after me.”

This Annette essayed to do, but her efforts brought such peals of laughter from Lucie that she stopped with a pout. “How you are a silly one,” exclaimed she. “Me, I am all French. Can I then be expected to know English? If you will perhaps write the words for me I may then be able to say them, but when you speak so fast and run the words together at such a rate I cannot follow you.” She produced a piece of paper and a stub of pencil. Lucie carefully wrote out the first line, handed the paper back to Annette and waited with a gleeful smile.

“Vay don oopon ze Svanay reebair,” began Annette reading slowly. Then down fluttered the paper. “I cannot,” she cried. “This English is a monster! a Turkey! a pig! a thing impossible. I do not see how you can understand or speak it.”

“I speak it as well as I do French,” returned Lucie proudly. “Mamma wishes that I shall, for one day, behold! we go to her home to that same United States, then before my relations I shall not feel ashamed. I should consider myself a silly one if I could not understand them nor they me.”

“For me then there will arise no occasion for feeling shame, and therefore there is no need to learn this tongue, for I have no relatives in that country,” returned Annette complacently. “Would you not, Lucie, prefer to be all French. Is it not a sorrow to you that you are part English?”

“No, no,” Lucie shook her head. “I am not English, and I am very proud of my American blood and that I have American aunts and uncles. As for my mother, she tells me that she became French when she married a Frenchman, so this is now her country as well as my father’s and mine. I adore my France where I was born and where I hope I may die when my hour comes. It is the land of my father, my mother, my dear old grandfather. No, you cannot say I am English, Annette.”

This outbreak entirely satisfied Annette, who quite willingly changed the subject when her friend proposed that they should go further into the garden to see a certain rose now blooming gloriously. “Is it not magnificent?” Lucie asked as they stopped before the bush.

Annette viewed it with admiration. “It is truly,” she acknowledged, “more beautiful than my grandfather’s. Now he will be envious, that poor grandfather, for ours has not half the number of blooms.”

“They are very droll, those two old ones, your grandfather and mine,” remarked Lucie. “To hear them argue over a bed of cabbages one would think them the most important things in the world. They are never so happy as when they are discussing the merits of their gardens. For my