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Then they left the great bazar and went on till they came to the silk market, where they found silks and brocades, orfrayed with red gold and diapered with white silver upon all manner of colours, and the owners lying dead upon mats of scented goats' leather, and looking as if they would speak; after which they traversed the market-street of pearls and rubies and other jewels and came to that of the schroffs and money-changers, whom they saw sitting dead upon carpets of raw silk and dyed stuffs in shops full of gold and silver.
The stalls for the sale of Persian and Central Asian carpets, old brocades and tapestries, and other wares dear to the lover of Eastern art, are in the minority, and must be hunted out. Manchester goods, cheap calicoes and prints, German cutlery, and Birmingham ware are found readily enough, and form the stock of two-thirds of the shops in the carpet and silk-mercers' arcade.
We shall come to be known as 'plain Boston' presently." There was no Worth or Pingat to charge enormous prices. Patterns were passed around. Ladies went visiting and took their sleeves along to make, or their ruffles to plait, and altered over their brocades and paduasoys and crapes, and some darned Brussels "footing" until it was transformed into really handsome lace.
The wonderful tone of the old prints, the silvery dusk, or the softly glowing colours that were like the sunset of another century; the warmth and splendour of the few brocades she had picked up in Italy; the suave religious feeling of the worn red velvet from some church in Florence; the candles in wrought-iron sconces, the shimmering firelight and the dreamy fragrance of tea roses all these things together made him think suddenly of sunshine over the Campagna and English gardens in the month of May and the burning reds and blues and golden greens of the Middle Ages.
And meanwhile, in this mediæval poetry, as in this mediæval painting, there are yards and yards of elaborate preciousness: all the embossed velvets, all the white-and-gold-shot brocades, all the silks and satins, and jewel-embroidered stuffs of the universe cast stiffly about these phantom men and women, these phantom horses and horsemen.
Here is noticeable, too, the sumptuous brocades in figures far too large for the human form to wear, figures which diminished greatly a very few decades later. The Institute of Art, Chicago, possesses an interesting piece of the period showing another treatment of a similar subject.
Picturesque the scene: ladies in paduasoys, taffetas, and brocades, gentlemen in purple, russet, and crimson coats, white satin waistcoats, buff breeches, and silk stockings.
"Now, as for this pretty doll, my little Alice," said Grandfather, "I wish you could have seen what splendid dresses the ladies wore in those times. They had silks, and satins, and damasks, and brocades, and high head-dresses, and all sorts of fine things. And they used to wear hooped petticoats of such enormous size that it was quite a journey to walk round them."
Out of unknown thickets comes forth the soft, secret, aromatic odour of the woods, not like a smell of the free heaven, but as though court ladies, who had known these paths in ages long gone by, still walked in the summer evenings, and shed from their brocades a breath of musk or bergamot upon the woodland winds.
We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded by a sleep; the selfsame sleep which these, our living dead men and women in steel armor and gauzy muslins, in silken hose and sock and buskin, epaulettes and top boots, brocades and buff facings, have endured so long and know so well!
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