It was all as picturesque as the markets used to be in Montreal and Quebec, and in a cloudy memory of his wedding journey long before, he bought so lavishly of the flowers to carry back to his wife that a little girl, who saw his arm-load from her window as he returned, laughed at him, and then drew shyly back.

Her laugh reminded him how many happy children he had seen in Germany, and how freely they seemed to play everywhere, with no one to make them afraid.
When they grow up the women laugh as little as the men, whose rude toil the soldiering leaves them to.
He got home with his flowers, and his wife took them absently, and made him join her in watching the sight which had fascinated her in the street under their windows.

A slender girl, with a waist as slim as a corseted officer's, from time to time came out of the house across the way to the firewood which had been thrown from a wagon upon the sidewalk there.

Each time she embraced several of the heavy four-foot logs and disappeared with them in-doors.

Once she paused from her work to joke with a well-dressed man who came by; and seemed to find nothing odd in her work; some gentlemen lounging at the window over head watched her with no apparent sense of anomaly.
"What do you think of that ?" asked Mrs.March.