But the evening! Then did the little communicants stroll round in modest groups with lighter heart and fuller stomach and with a distinct sense of food and finery. Gustavus--of whose flames the supper had smothered some portion, though a soft glow still lingered--roamed slowly up and down his garden, (for his brain was no dancing-place, but a moss-bank of joyous feelings), and tore open the tulip-leaves which had closed in slumber, in order to let loose from their flowery prison many a belated bee. At last, he leaned against the post of the rear garden gate and looked down longingly over the meadows into the village, where the rows of parents were chatting together and with eyes of motherly vanity following their children,--parents who to-day walked out for the first and haply for the last time, because peasants and orientals love best to sit. At that moment there moved cautiously around the garden-wall a shy picket of peasants' children, whose object was to hear more nearly the old starling, which Gustavus had to-day brought in its cage out into open air, and amuse themselves with the racy and saucy words the bird would utter in his tone of genuine irony. Children in strange clothes, and strange places, are strangers to each other; but Gustavus had fortunately his key-note at hand by which to pass over into conversation with them, the starling, and had only to begin one with him. And the plan succeeded; the rhetorical arts of the bird soon made the conversation so general and unembarrassed, that one could talk with every one about everything. Gustavus began to tell stories, but before a younger and fairer public than mine; his stories he invented and related at the same moment, and his fancy's wings hit against nothing in the immeasurable careering-ground. In fact, one invents more ingenious _contes_ in talking than in writing, and Madame D'Aunoy, whom I would rather marry than read, would have given us grown-up children better fairy tales if she had invented them before the ears of the little ones.
Under the pretext of sitting down, he invited and entreated his whole audience and public to come up to a terrace which, with a stairway, was woven and arched around a linden-tree in the garden.... I do not let my readers sit down so quickly; for bees, carvers, and I, love lindens exceedingly, those for the honey, these for the soft wood, and I for the sake of the name and the fragrance.