" These were all
the words it knew. It said the same words a thousand times a week. But
to Bebee it seemed that the starling most certainly knew that she was
sixteen years old that day.
Breaking her bread into the milk, she sat in the dawn and thought,
without knowing that she thought it, "How good it is to live when one
is young!"
Old people say the same thing often, but they sigh when they say it.
Bebee smiled.
Mere Krebs opened her door in the next cottage, and nodded over the wall.
"What a fine thing to be sixteen!--a merry year, Bebee."
Marthe, the carpenter's wife, came out from her gate, broom in hand.
"The Holy Saints keep you, Bebee; why, you are quite a woman now!"
The little children of Varnhart, the charcoal-burner, who were as poor as
any mouse in the old churches, rushed out of their little home up the
lane, bringing with them a cake stuck full of sugar and seeds, and tied
round with a blue ribbon, that their mother had made that very week, all
in her honor.
"Only see, Bebee! Such a grand cake!" they shouted, dancing down the
lane.
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