The Kitchen, With Its Two Box-Beds Hung With
Clean Check Curtains, With Its Wide Stone Chimney, Its Chimney-Shelf
Four
yards long and garnished with lanterns and religious statuettes, its
array of chests and pair of ticking clocks, was
The very model of what a
kitchen ought to be; a melodrama kitchen, suitable for bandits or
noblemen in disguise. Nor was the scene disgraced by the landlady, a
handsome, silent, dark old woman, clothed and hooded in black like a nun.
Even the public bedroom had a character of its own, with the long deal
tables and benches, where fifty might have dined, set out as for a
harvest-home, and the three box-beds along the wall. In one of these,
lying on straw and covered with a pair of table-napkins, did I do penance
all night long in goose-flesh and chattering teeth, and sigh, from time
to time as I awakened, for my sheepskin sack and the lee of some great
wood.
OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS
'I behold
The House, the Brotherhood austere -
And what am I, that I am here?'
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
FATHER APOLLINARIS
Next morning (Thursday, 26th September) I took the road in a new order.
The sack was no longer doubled, but hung at full length across the
saddle, a green sausage six feet long with a tuft of blue wool hanging
out of either end. It was more picturesque, it spared the donkey, and,
as I began to see, it would ensure stability, blow high, blow low.
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