The country people are grouped about,
with their clean baskets before them. Here, the lace-sellers;
there, the butter and egg-sellers; there, the fruit-sellers; there,
the shoe-makers. The whole place looks as if it were the stage of
some great theatre, and the curtain had just run up, for a
picturesque ballet. And there is the cathedral to boot: scene-
like: all grim, and swarthy, and mouldering, and cold: just
splashing the pavement in one place with faint purple drops, as the
morning sun, entering by a little window on the eastern side,
struggles through some stained glass panes, on the western.
In five minutes we have passed the iron cross, with a little ragged
kneeling-place of turf before it, in the outskirts of the town; and
are again upon the road.
CHAPTER II--LYONS, THE RHONE, AND THE GOBLIN OF AVIGNON
Chalons is a fair resting-place, in right of its good inn on the
bank of the river, and the little steamboats, gay with green and
red paint, that come and go upon it: which make up a pleasant and
refreshing scene, after the dusty roads. But, unless you would
like to dwell on an enormous plain, with jagged rows of irregular
poplars on it, that look in the distance like so many combs with
broken teeth: and unless you would like to pass your life without
the possibility of going up-hill, or going up anything but stairs:
you would hardly approve of Chalons as a place of residence.
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