And when summer came they stayed there all day, at the foot of the garden, on the bank of the stream--Jupillon on a laundry board resting on two stakes, pole in hand, and Germinie sitting, with the child in her skirts, under the medlar tree that overhung the stream. On pleasant days, the sun poured down upon the broad sparkling current, from which beams of light arose as from a mirror. It was like a display of fireworks from the sky and the stream, amid which Germinie would hold the little girl upon her feet and let her trample upon her with her little bare pink legs, in her short baby dress, her skin shimmering in spots in the sunlight, her flesh mottled with sunbeams like the flesh of angels Germinie had seen in pictures. She had a divinely sweet sensation when the little one, with the active hands of children that cannot talk, touched her chin and mouth and cheeks, persisted in putting her fingers in her eyes, rested them playfully on the lids, and kept them moving over her whole face, tickling and tormenting her with the dear little digits that seem to grope in the dark for a mother's features: it was as if her child's life and warmth were wandering over her face. From time to time she would bestow half of her smile on Jupillon over the little one's head, and would call to him: "Do look at her!" Then the child would fall asleep with the open mouth that laughs in sleep. Germinie would lean over her and listen to her breathing in repose. And, soothed by the peaceful respiration, she would gradually forget herself as she gazed dreamily at the poor abode of her happiness, the rustic garden, the apple-trees with their leaves covered with little yellow snails and the red-cheeked apples on the southern limbs, the poles, at whose feet the beanstalks, twisted and parched, were beginning to climb, the square of cabbages, the four sunflowers in the little circle in the centre of the path; and, close beside her, on the edge of the stream, the patches of grass covered with dog's mercury, the white heads of the nettles against the wall, the washerwomen's boxes, the bottles of lye and the bundle of straw scattered about by the antics of a puppy just out of the water. She gazed and dreamed. She thought of the past, having her future on her knees. With the grass and the trees and the river that were before her eyes, she reconstructed, in memory, the rustic garden of her rustic childhood. She saw again the two stones reaching down to the water, from which her mother, when she was a little child, used to wash her feet before putting her to bed in summertime. "Look you, Pere Remalard," said Jupillon from his board, on one of the hottest days in August, to the peasant who was watching him,--"do you know they won't bite at the red worm worth a sou?" "You must try the gentle," rejoined the peasant sententiously.