Epigraph
“How thick the dews have fallen,” he said to Herminé, as he seated himself contentedly on one of the white benches. “It is a happy thing for me, for it would have tired my old back sorely to begin to water the orange tubs this morning.”
Herminé smiled with delight, and nodded towards the Fountain Angel. She would have liked to laugh out loud, but reflected that her grandfather might ask what amused her.
“Really it all looks very well, considering the time of year,” mused the old gardener. “I might just do a little sweeping up, and then leave it. It is wonderful how heavy the dews are now the autumn comes on.”
Herminé left her grandfather with a broom in his hand, and went back again to the little cottage.
She worked very hard to keep everything clean and neat, and that day her foot felt lighter and more easily moved than she could ever remember it.
“Oh, I wonder if the Fountain Angel will really cure me,” she said to herself, as she scrubbed away at the black chest in which she and her grandfather kept their Sunday clothing. “How beautiful it would be to be able to run about like other children—how beautiful!”
Again that evening Herminé went into the Orange Garden, and for many evenings after; helping the Fountain Angel in his work, and bathing her lame foot in the healing water.
Note
Her grandfather noticed, with astonishment, that she had put aside her crutch-stick, and before very long she was able to run about as merrily as any of the children she used to long to play with on the grass by the marble Fountain.
* * * * * *
It is many, many years ago now, since little Herminé grew well and strong, and went away to a new country, where children with blue eyes like her own clustered round her knee in the soft summer twilight, but the Orange Garden remains unchanged.
The scent of flowers still fills the air; the water drips with the same soothing splash into the marble basin, and there, with his old sweet smile, stands the marble figure of the “Fountain Angel.”
BY R. M. BALLANTYNE,
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