o observe, the doings of a
group of persons, some seven boys and lads, and a girl. A kind of
uncouth courtship seemed to be in progress, or (as he put it) the
holding of a rude Court. He thought to see a Circe of picaresque Spain
with her swinish rout about her. To drop metaphor, the young woman sat
upon the hillock, with the half dozen tatterdemalions round her in
various stages of amorous enchantment.

He set the girl down for a gipsy, for he knew enough of the country to
be sure that no marriageable maiden of worth could be courted in this
fashion. Or if not a gipsy then a thing of nought, to be pitied if the
truth were known, at any rate to be skirted. Her hair, which seemed to
be of a dusty gold tinge, was knotted up in a red handkerchief; her
gown was of blue faded to green, her feet were bare. If a gipsy, she
was to be trusted to take care of herself; if but a sunburnt vagrant
she could be let to shift; and yet he watched her curiously, while she
sat as impassive as a young Sphinx, and wondered to himself why he did
it.

Suppose her of that sort you may see any day at a fair, jigging outside
a booth in red bodice and spangles, a waif, a little who-knows-who,
suppose her pretty to death--what is she even then but an iridescent
bubble, as one might say, thrown up by some standing pool of vice, as
filmy, very nearly as fleeting, and quite as poisonous? It struck him
as he watched--not the girl in particular, but a whole genus centred in
her--as really extraordinary, as an obliquity of Providence, that such
ephemerids must abound, predestined to misery; must come and sin, and
wail and go, with souls inside them to be saved, which nobody could
save, and bodies fair enough to be loved, which nobody could stoop to
love. Had the scheme of our Redemption scope enough for this--for this
trifle, along with Santa Teresa, and the Queen of Sheba, and Isabella
the Catholic? He perceived himself slipping into the sententious on
slight pretence--but presently found himself engaged.

Hatless, shoeless, and coatless were the oafs who surrounded the object
of his speculations, some lying flat, with elbows forward and chins to
fist; some creeping and scrambling about her to get her notice, or fire
her into a rage; some squatting at an easy distance with ribaldries to
exchange. But there was one, sitting a little above her on the mound,
who seemed to consider himself, in a sort, her proprietor. He was
master of the pack,