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Towns became trustees of property for the use of the mendicant orders; and the orders of Tertiaries, which flourished among them, enabled the townsfolk to attach themselves to religious societies without quitting the pursuits of lay life.
We had already met and exchanged speech with some of the townsfolk, and to retreat now might awaken suspicion. There was nothing for it but to adventure boldly, and I made up my mind to this the more readily because I had caught a glimpse of half a dozen fishing smacks lying in the little harbor, and a larger vessel of perhaps fifty tons moored to the jetty.
Except for the townsfolk who were now collected in the kitchen of the inn itself, no inhabitant was now outside his own threshold. Tom Scales was thinking of turning in. He was beginning to fell a little queer. He was thinking of the sexton, and could not get the fixed features of the dead man out of his head, when he heard the sharp though distant ring of a horse's hoof upon the frozen road.
For a long time the principle of laissez faire prevailed: the young fellows were left to the tender mercies of the townsfolk. There was no grandmotherly legislation in those days. Gradually a kind of joint-stock arrangement came into vogue.
The band and the militia company took him from the big stone church where sometimes he had gone to Sunday-school as a child, and a long procession of townsfolk wound around the hill to the cemetery, where David received a salute of guns, and the bugler played taps, and our eyes grew wet and our hearts were touched.
At times they seemed to melt into a shadow-mass of dreamland .... Time crawled on very slowly. Anxious forebodings oppressed me. Had Sir Anthony's valiancy stood the test? Had he been able to shake hands with his daughter's betrayer? Had he broken down during the drive side by side with him, amid the hooraying of the townsfolk? And Gedge?
Now, these brave men being dead, what do the rest of the townsfolk but fall down and yield obedience to Diabolus, and having eaten of the forbidden fruit, they become drunk therewith, and so opened both Eargate and Eyegate, and let in Diabolus and all his band, quite forgetting their good Shaddai and his law.
As the traveller sat on this ledge and wondered what scenes had been enacted here, how many deadly shots had sped from out the holes, what crowds of excited townsfolk had gathered in the church, what grave words of exhortation and of blessing had been spoken from the altar or the threshold by anxious prelate, robed and mitred for the Mass of Supplication to a God of Battles, an humble funeral appeared, a priest, a peasant bearing a black wooden Cross with the name of the deceased painted on it, a rope-bound coffin carried by hot and sorrowing women, and a little procession of friends.
The townsfolk became adepts at subtle irritations, against which there was not even the solace of interesting occupation; for except for daily drill there was nothing to do.
Lousteau began to feel that he was too much on show, and saw in the manners of the good townsfolk indications of the desires that had brought them there. "What trick can I play them?" thought he.
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