"Ay dear; when the frost kills your brave rosebush, root and bud, do you think of the thorns that pricked you, or only of the fair sweet-smelling things that flowered all your summer?"
Flowers belong to fairyland; the flowers and the birds, and the butterflies are all that the world has kept of its golden age; the only perfectly beautiful things on earth, joyous, innocent, half divine, useless, say they who are wiser than God.
When the day was done, Bébée gave a quick sigh as she looked across the square. She had so wanted to tell him that she was not ungrateful, and she had a little moss-rose ready, with a sprig of sweetbriar, and a tiny spray of maiden-hair fern that grew under the willows, which she had kept covered up with a leaf of sycamore all the day long.
No one would have it now.
The child went out of the place sadly, as the carillon rang. There was only the moss-rose in her basket, and the red and white currants that had been given her for her dinner.
She went along the twisting, many-coloured, quaintly-fashioned streets, till she came to the water-side.
It is very ancient, there still; there are all manner of old buildings, black and brown and grey, peaked roofs, gabled windows, arched doors, crumbling bridges, twisted galleries leaning to touch the dark surface of the canal, dusky wharves crowded with barrels, and bales, and cattle, and timber, and all the various freightage that the good ships come and go with all the year round, to and from the Zuyder Zee, and the Baltic water, and the wild Northumbrian shores, and the iron-bound Scottish headlands, and the pretty grey Norman seaports, and the white sandy dunes of Holland, with the toy towns and the straight poplar-trees.