It was a fact that each one of the six daughters of my grandfather were married for the sake of their fine eyes only, and made good marriages too.
“A pretty girl,” says the proverb, “carries her dowry in her face.”
But I must not leave this budding time of my childhood without plucking one more of memory’s blooms.
Behind the Judge’s Farm where I was born there was a moat, the waters of which supplied our old draw-well. The water, though not deep, was clear and rippling, and on a summer’s day the place was to me one of irresistible attraction.
The draw-well moat! It was the book in which, while amusing myself, I learnt my first lessons in natural history. There were fish, both stickleback and young carp, which, as they passed down the stream in shoals, I endeavoured to catch with a small canvas bag that had once served for nails, suspended on a long reed. There were little dragon-flies, green, blue, and black, who, as they alighted on the reeds gently, oh so gently, I seized with my small fingers—that is when they did not escape me, lightly and silently, with a shimmer of their gauzy wings; there also was to be found a kind of brown insect with a white belly which leaped in the water and moved his tiny paws like a cobbler at work. Little frogs too, with dark gold-spotted backs showing among the tufts of moss, and who, on seeing me, nimbly plunged in the stream; and the triton, a sort of aquatic salamander, who wriggled round in a circle; and great horned beetles, those scavengers of the pools, called by us the “eel-killers.”
Add to all these a mass of aquatic plants, such as the cats-tail, that long cottony blossom of the typha-plant; and the water-lily, its wide round leaves and white cup magnificently outspread on the water’s smooth surface; the gladiole with its clusters of pink flowers and the pale narcissus mirrored in the stream; the duckweed with its minute leaves; the ox-tongue, which flowers like a lustre; and the forget-me-not, myosotis, named in Provence “eyes of the Child Jesus.”
But of all this wonder-world, what held my fancy most was the water-iris, a large plant growing at the water’s edge in big clumps, with long sword-shaped leaves and beautiful yellow blooms raising high their heads like golden halberds. The golden lilies, which on an azure field form the arms of France and of Provence, were undoubtedly suggested by these same water-iris, for the lily and the iris are really of the same family, and the azure of the coat-of-arms faithfully represents the water by the edge of which the iris grows.
It was a summer’s day, about the harvest time. All the people of the farm-house were out at work, helping to bind up the sheaves. Some twenty men, bare-armed, marched by twos and fours, round the horses and mules who were treading hard. Some took off the ears of corn or tossed the straw with their long wooden forks, while others, bare-foot, danced gaily in the sunshine on the fallen grain. High in the air, upheld by the three supports of a rustic crane, the winnowing cradle was suspended. A group of women and girls with baskets threw the corn and husks into the net of the sieve, and the master, my father, vigorous and erect, swung the sieve towards the wind, turning the bad grains on to the top. When the wind abated or at intervals ceased, my father, with the motionless sieve in his hands, facing the wind and gazing out into the blue, would say in all seriousness, as though addressing a friendly god: “Come, blow, blow, dear wind.”
And I have seen the “mistral,” on my word, in obedience to the wish of the patriarch, again and again draw breath, thus carrying off the refuse while the blessed fine wheat fell in a white shower on the conical heap visibly rising in the midst of the winnowers.
At sunset, after the grain had been heaped up with shovels, and the men, all powdered with dust, had gone off to wash at the well and draw water for the beasts, my father with great strides