Excerpt from The Heart of Her Highness The spring of the year 1477 was yet young in Flanders. A winter of cruel rigour was scarce over; but every creature, every thing seemed trying to throw off the long oppression of misery, trying to forget the bitter past and to find life anew, and find it good in spite of all. Hovels and huts which had been barricaded against the cold, so that huddling humans and dumb brutes might lend of their bodies' warmth one to ather, were open to the April sunshine - the beasts turned out to graze, the children to play. Old folks knelt in the great churches without suffering from the deadly, numbing cold. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art techlogy to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.