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.”