ght;
with wondrous scroll-works and quaint signs at the doors of all its
traders; with monks' cowls and golden croziers and white-robed acolytes
in its streets; with the subtle smoke of incense coming out from the
cathedral door to mingle with the odours of the fruits and flowers in
the market-place; with great flat-bottomed boats drifting down the river
under the leaning eaves of its dwellings; and with the galleries of its
opposing houses touching so nearly that a girl leaning in one could
stretch a Provence rose or toss an Easter egg across to her neighbour in
the other.

Doubtless there were often squalor, poverty, dust, filth, and
uncomeliness within these old and beautiful homes. Doubtless often the
dwellers therein were housed like cattle and slept like pigs, and looked
but once out to the woods and waters of the landscapes round for one
hundred times that they looked at their hidden silver in an old delf
jug, or at their tawdry coloured prints of St. Victorian or St. Scaevola.

But yet much of the beauty and the nobility of the old, simple, restful,
rich-hued life of the past still abode there, and remained with them. In
the straight, lithe form of their maidens, untrammelled by modern garb,
and moving with the free majestic grace of forest does. In the vast,
dim, sculptured chambers, where the grandam span by the wood fire, and
the little children played in the shadows, and the lovers whispered in
the embrasured window. In the broad market-place, where the mules
cropped the clover, and the tawny awnings caught the sunlight, and the
white caps of the girls framed faces fitted for the pencils of missal
painters, and the flush of colour from mellow wall-fruits and
grape-clusters glanced amidst the shelter of deepest, freshest green. In
the perpetual presence of their cathedral, which, through sun and storm,
through frost and summer, through noon and midnight, stood there amidst
them, and watched the galled oxen tread their painful way, and the
scourged mules droop their humble heads, and the helpless, harmless
flocks go forth to the slaughter, and the old weary lives of the men and
women pass through hunger and cold to the grave, and the sun and the
moon rise and set, and the flowers and the children blossom and fade,
and the endless years come and go, bringing peace, bringing war;
bringing harvest, bringing famine; bringing life, bringing death; and,
beholding these, still said to the multitude in its terrible i