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His background always is his own country; his characters Micolau the big shepherd, gossip Guihaumeto, Tòni, Christòu, and the rest always are Provençaux: wearing Provençaux pink-bordered jackets, and white hats bedizened with ribbons, and marching to Bethlehem to the sound of the galoubet and tambourin.
He is a modern, yet not very recent addition, the fowler, as is shown by the fact that he carries a flint-lock fowling-piece. Drumming and fifing being absolute essentials to every sort of Provençal festivity, a conspicuous figure always is found playing on a tambourin and galoubet.
It was at once his library a scanty one, for the poet held tenaciously to but a few books his sideboard, his secrétaire, his music cabinet giving lodgment in this last capacity to a single work, "The Complete and Classical Preceptor for Galoubet, Containing Tunes, Polkas and Military Pieces."
The tambourin and galoubet and palets and carlamuso all together struck up again; and the shepherds and the lamb's car passed down the nave between the files of candle-bearers and so out through the door. Within the past sixty years or so this naïve ceremony has fallen more and more into disuse.
In the lead were four musicians playing upon the tambourin, the galoubet, the very small cymbals called palets, and the bagpipe-like carlamuso and then, two by two, came ten shepherds: wearing the long brown full cloaks, weather-stained and patched and mended, which seem always to have come down through many generations and which never by any chance are new; carrying tucked beneath their arms their battered felt hats browned, like their cloaks, by long warfare with sun and rain; holding in one hand a lighted candle and in the other a staff.
Pasted on the foot-board of the bed was an old engraving of a wandering musician mountebank, playing a galoubet as an accompaniment to a dancing dog and a cock on stilts, a never-wearying picture for Straws, with his migratory, vagabond proclivities.
The grey-bearded magistrates, in their velvet caps and robes, wearing their golden chains of office; the great log, swung to shoulder-poles and borne by leathern-jerkined henchmen; surely drummers and fifers, for such a ceremonial would have been impossibly incomplete in Provence without a tambourin and galoubet; doubtless a brace of ceremonial trumpeters; and a seemly guard in front and rear of steel-capped and steel-jacketed halbardiers.
With as little inconvenience as might be imagined the lodger could plunge his hand into his cupboard and pull out a pipe, a box of matches, a bottle of ink, a bottle of something else, paper and pins, and, last but not least, his beloved tin whistle of three holes, variously dignified a fretiau, a frestele, or a galoubet, upon which he played ravishing tunes.
The little Provencales in their short petticoats and brown stockings, and their broad-brimmed black hats, enjoyed themselves to their hearts' content in the shade to the sound of the galoubet, while my eyes wandered between the umbrella pines across the wide sea horizon, of that lapis-blue peculiar to the Mediterranean. It was more primitive then than it is nowadays, but not a whit less lovely.
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