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For All That, The Forest Has Been Of Use To Jacques, Not Only
Warming Him With Fallen Wood, But
Giving him shelter in days of
sore trouble, when my lord of the chateau, with all his troopers
and trumpets,
Had been beaten from field after field into some
ultimate fastness, or lay over-seas in an English prison. In these
dark days, when the watch on the church steeple saw the smoke of
burning villages on the sky-line, or a clump of spears and
fluttering pensions drawing nigh across the plain, these good folk
gat them up, with all their household gods, into the wood, whence,
from some high spur, their timid scouts might overlook the coming
and going of the marauders, and see the harvest ridden down, and
church and cottage go up to heaven all night in flame. It was but
an unhomely refuge that the woods afforded, where they must abide
all change of weather and keep house with wolves and vipers. Often
there was none left alive, when they returned, to show the old
divisions of field from field. And yet, as times went, when the
wolves entered at night into depopulated Paris, and perhaps De Retz
was passing by with a company of demons like himself, even in these
caves and thickets there were glad hearts and grateful prayers.
Once or twice, as I say, in the course of the ages, the forest may
have served the peasant well, but at heart it is a royal forest,
and noble by old associations.
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