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While she was gone to cry her farewells over the
pork, I gave that whole peerage away to the servants.
And I asked them to take a duster and dust around a
little where the nobilities had mainly lodged and promenaded; but they considered that that would be hardly
worth while, and would moreover be a rather grave
departure from custom, and therefore likely to make
talk. A departure from custom -- that settled it; it
was a nation capable of committing any crime but
that. The servants said they would follow the fashion,
a fashion grown sacred through immemorial observance;
they would scatter fresh rushes in all the rooms
and halls, and then the evidence of the aristocratic
visitation would be no longer visible. It was a kind of
satire on Nature: it was the scientific method, the
geologic method; it deposited the history of the family
in a stratified record; and the antiquary could dig
through it and tell by the remains of each period what
changes of diet the family had introduced successively
for a hundred years.
The first thing we struck that day was a procession
of pilgrims. It was not going our way, but we joined
it, nevertheless; for it was hourly being borne in
upon me now, that if I would govern this country
wisely, I must be posted in the details of its life,
and not at second hand, but by personal observation
and scrutiny.
This company of pilgrims resembled Chaucer's in
this: that it had in it a sample of about all the upper
occupations and professions the country could show,
and a corresponding variety of costume. There were
young men and old men, young women and old
women, lively folk and grave folk. They rode upon
mules and horses, and there was not a side-saddle in
the party; for this specialty was to remain unknown in
England for nine hundred years yet.
It was a pleasant, friendly, sociable herd; pious,
happy, merry and full of unconscious coarsenesses and
innocent indecencies. What they regarded as the
merry tale went the continual round and caused no
more embarrassment than it would have caused in the
best English society twelve centuries later. Practical
jokes worthy of the English wits of the first quarter of
the far-off nineteenth century were sprung here and
there and yonder along the line, and compelled the
delightedest applause; and sometimes when a bright
remark was made at one end of the procession and
started on its travels toward the other, you could note
its progress all the way by the sparkling spray of
laughter it threw off from its bows as it plowed along;
and also by the blushes of the mules in its wake.
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