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In the case of a butcher's, for example, the front part of the shutters that covered the unglazed window at night, was let down in business hours so that it hung over the footway. On it were exhibited the joints of meat. Butchers' slaughter-houses were then, as now, private premises and right in the heart of the city. The rooms in the houses were quite small, with low ceilings.
Moreover round it was a footway about five feet across, from which opened chambers, unroofed now, that the bathers used as dressing-rooms, while between these chambers stood the remains of statues. It was that of a nude young woman in the attitude of diving, a very beautiful bit of work, I thought, though of course I am no judge of sculpture.
It was very hot, but the windows were shut lest the sound of the good ladies' voices should be heard without; for the news that Marietta was to be married had suddenly gone abroad through Murano, and all the idlers, and the men from the furnaces, where no work was done on Sunday, as well as all the poor, were assembled on the footway and the bridge, and in the narrow alleys round the house.
Booths of all kinds displayed their wares; quacks, mountebanks, ballad-singers and puppet-shows, drew crowds of listeners. Evelyn describes the footway as being three to four feet higher than the road; and at the foot of the bridge, says the traveller, is a water-house, "whereon, at a great height is the story of our Saviour and the Woman of Samaria pouring water out of a bucket.
But the young poet, in his solitary rambles amid the noble scenery of Arthur's Seat and the adjoining valleys, had become intimately acquainted with every path which led through their romantic recesses; and he now sped along the broken footway which skirted the mountain-side with as much confidence as if he had trod on a level sward in the light of noonday.
In most of the side alleys, however, some of which dated back as far, and farther, than the fifteenth century, there was no footway for passengers, and barely space for one wheeled vehicle at a time. A filthy gutter invariably flowed down the middle of the street.
The paved footway was empty save for a single figure, pacing slowly before the doorway of number 6A, in which, though the wig had now given place to a felt hat and the gown to a jacket, I had no difficulty in recognising my friend. "Punctual to the moment, as of old," said he, meeting me half-way. "What a blessed virtue is punctuality, even in small things.
In fact, he never balked at anything asked of him save once at a shaky "parao," or footway, constructed along the face of the cliff on timbers thrust into holes bored in the solid rock, and another time when he refused a jump from a boggy rice-field to the top of a crumbling wall hardly a foot wide with another bog on the other side.
With cries of fear the women if women they were fled, their lights showing again from the second exit, where was the beaten footway, and then out of the dark tunnel came a peal of fiendish laughter. Then silence, or, rather, a relief from the mocking voices; but there was a reminder of their presence in one of those pale greenish lights.
From these galleries we emerged out on a narrow footway cut in the rock, and stood perpendicularly over the sea breaking at our feet, and had a fine view of the N.E. face of the Rock rising in a magnificent mass some 1500 feet. From this point a tower, called the Queen of Spain's Chair, was pointed out to me on the height opposite, to the northward.
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