"What has this same reality," said Idoine, playfully, "taken away from you or done to you? I love it; where then are _you_ to be found for us except in reality?" "I," said Julienne, "am thinking of something quite different; one is ashamed here, that one has yet done so little with all one's willing. From willing to doing is, however, to be sure, a long step here," she subjoined, while she placed her little finger on her _heart_, and stretched the fore-finger as if vainly attempting to span from there to her _head_. "Idoine, tell me, how then can one think of what is great and what is little at once?" "By thinking of the greatest first," said she; "when one looks into the sun, the dust and the midges become most visible. God is, surely, the sun of us all." The earthly sun stood now looking toward them far down on an immeasurable plain amid mild roses of Heaven. A distant windmill flung its arms broadly through the fair purple glow; on the mountain declivities children sang near the pastured herds, and their smaller brothers and sisters were playing under their eye; the evening bell, which in Arcadia was always tolled at the farewell of the sun, rocked sun and earth to slumber with its vibrations; not only in youthful, but even in childlike beauty lay the soft little village and its world round about them. No storm, one said to one's self, can intrude into this soft land, no winter stalk in in heavy panoply of ice: here, one thought, only spring winds and rosy clouds come and go: no rains fall, except early rains, and no leaves, except those of the blossoms: only dust from the flowers rises here; and the rainbow,--only forget-me-nots and May-flowers hold it upon their little blue and white leaves; the landscape and life and all seemed here to be only a continuous morning twilight, so fresh and new, full of presentiment and contentment, without glow or glitter, and with a few stars over the morning red. Children with wreaths of grain in their hands sat on other people's wagons full of sheaves, and rode proudly in. Idoine hung with hearty love, as if this evening made it all new, upon the double groups. "Only the countryman is so fortunate," said she, "as to live on in all the Arcadian relations of his childhood. The old man sees nothing around him but implements and labors which as a child he also saw and plied. At last he goes up into that garden over yonder, and sleeps it out." She pointed to the churchyard on the hill, which was a veritable garden, with flower-beds and a wall of fruit-trees. Julienne looked thither with agitation,--she saw the dark curtain tremble behind which her sick brother was soon to be borne.