Gabriel and the Hour Book

Each 1 vol., small quarto, illustrated and decorated in colour. $1.00 The Roses of Saint Elizabeth By JANE SCOTT WOODRUFF Gabriel and the Hour Book By EVALEEN STEIN The Enchanted Automobile Translated from the French by MARY J. SAFFORD Pussy-Cat Town By MARION AMES TAGGART L. C. PAGE & COMPANY New England Building BOSTON, MASS.

Gabriel
L. C. Page & Company Boston Mcmvi
COLONIAL PRESS Electrotyped and Printed by C.H. Simonds & Co. Boston, U.S.A.
TO My friend Caroline H. Griffiths

T was a bright morning of early April, many hundred years ago; and through all the fields and meadows of Normandy the violets and cuckoo-buds were just beginning to peep through the tender green of the young grass. The rows of tall poplar-trees that everywhere, instead of fences, served to mark off the farms of the country folk, waved in the spring wind like great, pale green plumes; and among their branches the earliest robins and field-fares were gaily singing as a little boy stepped out from a small thatched cottage standing among the fields, and took his way along the highroad.
That Gabriel Viaud was a peasant lad, any one could have told from the blouse of blue homespun, and the wooden shoes which he wore; and that he felt the gladness of the April time could easily be known by the happy little song he began to sing to himself, and by the eager delight with which he now and then stooped to pluck a blue violet or to gather a handful of golden cuckoo-buds.
A mile or two behind him, and hidden by a bend in the road, lay the little village of St. Martin-de-Bouchage; while in the soft blue distance ahead of him rose the gray walls of St. Martin's Abbey, whither he was going.
Indeed, for almost a year now the little boy had been trudging every day to the Abbey, where he earned a small sum by waiting upon the good brothers who dwelt there, and who made the beautiful painted books for which the Abbey had become famous. Gabriel could grind and mix their colours for them, and prepare the parchment on which they did their writing, and could do many other little things that helped them in their work.