middle of courtyards full
of straggling buildings, wine-presses, cart-sheds, and distilleries
scattered under thick trees, with ladders, poles, or scythes hung on to
the branches. The thatched roofs, like fur caps drawn over eyes, reach
down over about a third of the low windows, whose coarse convex glasses
have knots in the middle like the bottoms of bottles. Against the
plaster wall, diagonally crossed by black joists, a meagre pear-tree
sometimes leans, and the ground floors have at their door a small
swing-gate, to keep out the chicks that come pilfering crumbs of bread
steeped in cider on the threshold. But the courtyards grow narrower, the
houses closer together, and the fences disappear; a bundle of ferns
swings under a window from the end of a broomstick; there is a
blacksmith's forge and then a wheelwright's, with two or three new carts
outside that partly block up the way. Then across an open space appears
a white house beyond a grass mound ornamented by a Cupid, his finger on
his lips; two brass vases are at each end of a flight of steps;
scutcheons[2] blaze upon the door. It is the notary's house, and the
finest in the place.

[Footnote 2: The _panonceaux_ that have to be hung over the doors of
notaries.--TRANS.]

The church is on the other side of the street, twenty paces farther
down, at the entrance of the square. The little cemetery that surrounds
it, closed in by a wall breast-high, is so full of graves that the old
stones, level with the ground, form a continuous pavement, on which the
grass of itself has marked out regular green squares. The church was
rebuilt during the last years of the reign of Charles X. The wooden roof
is beginning to rot from the top, and here and there has black hollows
in its blue color. Over the door, where the organ should be, is a loft
for the men, with a spiral staircase that reverberates under their wooden
shoes.

The daylight coming through the plain glass windows falls obliquely upon
the pews ranged along the walls, which are adorned here and there with a
straw mat bearing beneath it the words in large letters, "Monsieur
So-and-so's pew." And at the spot where the building narrows, the
confessional forms a pendant to a statuette of the Virgin, clothed in a
satin robe, coifed with a tulle veil sprinkled with silver stars, and
with red cheeks, like an idol of the Sandwich Islands; and, finally, a
copy of the "Holy Family, presented by the Minister of the Interior,"
ov