Could his
great-great-grandfather have been dug up and set in that barn door, he
would have looked just the same, so would the sacks, and the wheat, and
the sunshine.
At the market town, where the auctioneer's hammer goes tap
tap over bullocks and sheep, crowds of men gather together, - farmers, and
bailiffs, and shepherds, drovers and labourers - and their clothes are
different, but there are the same old weather-beaten faces. Faces that
you may see in the ancient illuminated manuscripts, in the realistic wood
engravings of early printed books, in the etchings of last century, the
same lines and expression. The earth has marked them all. In a modern
country sketch or picture you would - not - find them, they would be
smoothed away - drawing-room faces, made transparent, in attitudes like
easy-limbed girls delicately proportioned These are not country people.
Country people are the same now in appearance as when the old artists
honestly drew them; sturdy and square, bulky and slow, no attitudes, no
drawing-room grace, no Christmas card glossiness; somewhat stiff of limb,
with a distinct flavour of hay and straw about them, and no enamel. In
the villages cottagers have no ideas of tastefully disposing their
mantles about their shoulders, or of dressing for the occasion. I do not
know how to describe the form of a middle-aged cottage woman on a stormy
day with a large, greenish umbrella, a round bonnet, huge and enclosing
all the head, back, and sides, like the vast helm of the knights, a sort
of circular cloak, stout ankles well visible, and sometimes pattens; the
wearer inside all this decidedly bulky, and the whole apparatus coming
along through mud and rain with great deliberation.
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