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Here and there upon the higher ground, half concealed by walnut-trees, were small chateaux or farmhouses, with a castellated air derived from great dovecots and towers, which last once served for the defence of the manor-house or the little castle.
The tower-like pigeon-house, with extinguisher roof, stood at one end upon projecting beams, and the pigeons kept going in and coming out of the holes in their two-storied mansion. One sees dovecots everywhere in this district, and most of them are two or three centuries old. Some are attached to houses, and others are isolated on the hillsides amongst the vines.
The lawyer chatted kindly and intelligently; he gave Daddy Darwin wine and biscuit, and talked of the long standing of the Darwin family and its vicissitudes; he even took down some fat yellow books, and showed the old man how many curious laws had been made from time to time for the special protection of pigeons in Dovecots, very ancient statutes making the killing of a house-dove felony.
Some twenty windmills no less and perhaps more are perched like dovecots on the hill, lifting their sails to the blue sky. Some day I will seek out a notary at Cassel and will get him to execute a deed of conveyance assigning to me, with no restrictive covenants, the freehold of one of those mills, for I have coveted a mill ever since I succumbed to the enchantments of Lettres de mon moulin.
On the Cousin, which flows majestically through some of the most magnificent pastures in the world, and on the summit of a large hill, stands the charming Château des Panolas, the towers and walls of which, covered with pointed roofs and weather-cocks, and surrounded by domes, belvederes, and old-fashioned dovecots, give it at a distance the appearance of some oriental building.
Ida thought of Kingthorpe, the rustic inn with its queer old gables, shining lattices, quaint dovecots, the green, the pond, with its willowy island, the lovely old Gothic church solid, and grave, and gray calm amidst the shade of immemorial yews.
His general effect was of one who is earnestly keeping up things that might otherwise give way, keeping them up by act and voice, keeping up an atmosphere of vigour and success in a school that was only too manifestly attenuated, keeping up a pretentious economy of administration in a school that must not be too manifestly impoverished, keeping up a claim to be in the scientific van and rather a flutterer of dovecots with its method of manual training for example keeping up ESPRIT DE CORPS and the manliness of himself and every one about him, keeping up his affection for his faithful second wife and his complete forgetfulness of and indifference to that spirit of distracting impulse and insubordination away there in London, who had once been his delight and insurmountable difficulty.
Even when the flames attacked the buildings to which the dovecots were attached, the birds wheeled round and round them, until, their pinions being scorched by the fire, they dropped into the water. Leonard remained on the river nearly two hours. He could not, in fact, tear himself away from the spectacle, which possessed a strange fascination in his eyes.
Every one remarks on their similarity to dovecots and one almost imagines that they must have been built as a place of shelter on stormy days for the great gilded cock that forms the weather vane.
In the lower part of this valley were scattered farmhouses, which looked like small rural churches, for their high rectangular dovecots at one end had much the air of towers with broach spires. Throughout Guyenne one is amazed at the apparently extravagant scale on which accommodation has been provided for pigeon-rearing.
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