There is a dignity of peasants as well as of kings—the dignity that comes from all absence of effort, all freedom from pretence. Bébée had this, and she had more still than this: she had the absolute simplicity of childhood with her still.
Some women have it still when they are fourscore.
Prosper Bar, who is a Calvinist, always says, "Do not mix up prayer and play; you would not cut a gherkin in your honey;" but I do not know why he called prayer a gherkin, because it is sweet enough—sweeter than anything, I think.
There is not much change in the great Soignies woods. They are aisles on aisles of beautiful green trees, crossing and recrossing; tunnels of dark foliage that look endless; long avenues of beech, of oak, of elm, or of fir, with the bracken and the brushwood growing dense between; a delicious forest growth everywhere, shady even at noon, and, by a little past midday, dusky as evening; with the forest fragrance, sweet and dewy, all about, and under the fern the stirring of wild game, and the white gleam of little rabbits, and the sound of the wings of birds.
Soignies is not legend-haunted like the Black Forest, nor king-haunted like Fontainebleau, nor sovereign of two historic streams like the brave woods of Heidelberg; nor wild and romantic, and broken with black rocks, and poetised by the shade of Jaques, and swept through by a perfect river, like its neighbours of Ardennes; nor throned aloft on mighty mountains like the majestic oak glades of the Swabian hills of the ivory-carvers.
Soignies is only a Flemish forest in a plain, throwing its shadow over corn-fields and cattle-pastures, with no panorama beyond it and no wonders in its depth. But it is a fresh, bold, beautiful forest for all that.
It has only green leaves to give—green leaves always, league after league; but there is about it that vague mystery which all forests have, and this universe of leaves seems boundless, and Pan might dwell in it, and St. Hubert, and John Keats.