Now,
if the tanneries still existed, the poetry of the cheeps' tails had
vanished from the portals. But our friends were consoled by meeting
numbers of the peasants jolting home from market in the painted carts,
which are doubtless of the pattern of the carts first built there two
hundred years ago. They were grateful for the immortal old wooden,
crooked and brown with the labor of the fields, who abounded in these
vehicles; when a huge girl jumped from the tail of her cart, and showed
the thick, clumsy ankles of a true peasant-maid, they could only sigh out
their unspeakable satisfaction.
Gardens embowered and perfumed the low cottages, through the open doors
of which they could see the exquisite neatness of the life within. One of
the doors opened into a school-house, where they beheld with rapture the
school-mistress, book in hand, and with a quaint cap on her gray head,
and encircled by her flock of little boys and girls.
By and by it began to rain again; and now while their driver stopped to
put up the top of the barouche, they entered a country church which had
taken their fancy, and walked up the aisle with the steps that blend with
silence rather than break it, while they heard only the soft whisper of
the shower without.
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