I was as nearly home-sick as ever I was in my life;
they seemed to make it such an incalculable distance
to the place where I first saw the day. They
admired the canoes very much. And I observed
one piece of delicacy in these children, which is worthy
of record. They had been deafening us for the
last hundred yards with petitions for a sail; ay,
and they deafened us to the same tune next morning
when we came to start; but then, when the canoes were
lying empty, there was no word of any such petition.
Delicacy? or perhaps a bit of fear for the water
in so crank a vessel? I hate cynicism a great
deal worse than I do the devil; unless perhaps the
two were the same thing? And yet ’tis a
good tonic; the cold tub and bath-towel of the sentiments;
and positively necessary to life in cases of advanced
sensibility.
From the boats they turned to my costume. They
could not make enough of my red sash; and my knife
filled them with awe.
‘They make them like that in England,’
said the boy with one arm. I was glad he did
not know how badly we make them in England now-a-days.
‘They are for people who go away to sea,’
he added, ’and to defend one’s life against
great fish.’
I felt I was becoming a more and more romantic figure
to the little group at every word. And so I
suppose I was. Even my pipe, although it was
an ordinary French clay pretty well ‘trousered,’
as they call it, would have a rarity in their eyes,
as a thing coming from so far away. And if my
feathers were not very fine in themselves, they were
all from over seas. One thing in my outfit,
however, tickled them out of all politeness; and that
was the bemired condition of my canvas shoes.
I suppose they were sure the mud at any rate was
a home product. The little girl (who was the
genius of the party) displayed her own sabots in competition;
and I wish you could have seen how gracefully and
merrily she did it.
The young woman’s milk-can, a great amphora
of hammered brass, stood some way off upon the sward.
I was glad of an opportunity to divert public attention
from myself, and return some of the compliments I
had received. So I admired it cordially both
for form and colour, telling them, and very truly,
that it was as beautiful as gold. They were
not surprised. The things were plainly the boast
of the countryside. And the children expatiated
on the costliness of these amphorae, which sell sometimes
as high as thirty francs apiece; told me how they
were carried on donkeys, one on either side of the
saddle, a brave caparison in themselves; and how they
were to be seen all over the district, and at the
larger farms in great number and of great size.
WE ARE PEDLARS
