off the wet, and making a good drying-place wherein to hang up
herbs, or implements, or what not. A better custom than the
popular one of keeping the refuse-heap and puddle close before the
house door: which, although I paint my dwelling never so brightly
blue (and it cannot be too blue for me, hereabouts), will bring
fever inside my door. Wonderful poultry of the French-Flemish
country, why take the trouble to BE poultry? Why not stop short at
eggs in the rising generation, and die out and have done with it?
Parents of chickens have I seen this day, followed by their
wretched young families, scratching nothing out of the mud with an
air – tottering about on legs so scraggy and weak, that the valiant
word drumsticks becomes a mockery when applied to them, and the
crow of the lord and master has been a mere dejected case of croup.
Carts have I seen, and other agricultural instruments, unwieldy,
dislocated, monstrous. Poplar-trees by the thousand fringe the
fields and fringe the end of the flat landscape, so that I feel,
looking straight on before me, as if, when I pass the extremest
fringe on the low horizon, I shall tumble over into space. Little
whitewashed black holes of chapels, with barred doors and Flemish
inscriptions, abound at roadside corners, and often they are
garnished with a sheaf of wooden crosses, like children’s swords;
or, in their default, some hollow old tree with a saint roosting in
it, is similarly decorated, or a pole with a very diminutive saint
enshrined aloft in a sort of sacred pigeon-house. Not that we are
deficient in such decoration in the town here, for, over at the
church yonder, outside the building, is a scenic representation of
the Crucifixion, built up with old bricks and stones, and made out
with painted canvas and wooden figures: the whole surmounting the
dusty skull of some holy personage (perhaps), shut up behind a
little ashy iron grate, as if it were originally put there to be
cooked, and the fire had long gone out. A windmilly country this,
though the windmills are so damp and rickety, that they nearly
knock themselves off their legs at every turn of their sails, and
creak in loud complaint. A weaving country, too, for in the
wayside cottages the loom goes wearily – rattle and click, rattle
and click – and, looking in, I see the poor weaving peasant, man or
woman, bending at the work, while the child, working too, turns a
little hand-wheel put upon the ground to suit its height. An
unconscionable monster, the loom in a small dwelling, asserting
himself ungenerously as the bread-winner, straddling over the
children’s straw beds, cramping the family in space and air, and
making himself generally objectionable and tyrannical. He is
tributary, too, to ugly mills and factories and bleaching-grounds,
rising out of the sluiced fields in an abrupt bare way, disdaining,
like himself, to be ornamental or accommodating. Surrounded by
these things, here I stood on the steps of the Hotel de Ville,
persuaded to remain by the P. Salcy family, fifteen dramatic
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
subjects strong.
There was a Fair besides. The double persuasion being
irresistible, and my sponge being left behind at the last Hotel, I
made the tour of the little town to buy another. In the small
sunny shops – mercers, opticians, and druggist-grocers, with here
and there an emporium of religious images – the gravest of old
spectacled Flemish husbands and wives sat contemplating one another
across bare counters, while the wasps, who seemed to have taken
military possession of the town, and to have placed it under waspmartial
law, executed warlike manoeuvres in the windows. Other
shops the wasps had entirely to themselves, and nobody cared and
nobody came when I beat with a five-franc piece upon the board of
custom. What I sought was no more to be found than if I had sought
a nugget of Californian gold: so I went, spongeless, to pass the
evening with the Family P. Salcy.
The members of the Family P. Salcy were so fat and so like one
another – fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, uncles, and aunts –