FOLLE-FARINE. ye
place was profoundly still; scarcely a child at play iu the
streets, scarcely a dog asleep in the sun.
When the crowds had gone the priests laid aside
their vestments, and donned the black serge of their daily
habit, and went to their daily avocations in their humble
dweUings.
The crosses and the censers were put back upon their
altars, and hung up upon their pillars.
The boy choristers and the little children put their Avhitc
linen and their scarlet robes back in cupboards and presses,
with heads of lavender and sprigs of rosemary to keep the
moth and the devil away, and Avent to their fields, to their
homes, to their herds, to their paper kites, to their daisy
chains, to the poor rabbits th^y pent in a hutch, to the poor
flies they killed in the sun.
The toAvn became quite still, the market place quite
empty ; the drowsy silence of a burning, cloudless afternoon
was over aU the quiet places about the cathedral walls,
where of old the bishops and the canons dwelt; grey shady
courts ; dim open cloisters; houses covered with oaken
carvings, and shadowed with the spreading branches of
chestnuts and of lime-trees that were as aged as them¬
selves.
Under the sh( Iter of one of the lindens, after the popu¬
lace had gone, tl lere Avas seated on a broad stone bench the
girl who had st :)od by the wayside erect and unbending a-a
the procession had moved before her.
She had flung herself down in dreamy restfulness. She
had delivered her burden of vegetables and fruit at a shop
near by, whose awning stretched out into the street like a
toadstool yelloAV with the sun. The heat was intense ; she
had been on foot all day; she sat to rest a moment, and
put her burning hands under a little rill of water that
spouted into a basin in a niche in the wall. An ancient
weU, Avith a stone image of the Madonna sculptured above,
and a wreath of vine-leaves in stone running around, in the
lavish ornamentation of an age when men loved loveliness
for its own sake, and begrudged neither time nor labour in
its sGrvicG
She leaned over the fountain, kept so cool by the roofing
cf the thick green leaves ; there was a metal cup attached
to the basin by a chain, and she filled it at the running
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