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It was a gay old town in those days, kind to its lads and lasses, and if the streets were grass-grown, it seemed only that so they might give softer footing to the young feet that trod them. Almost every night there was a festival at one house or another, and this evening the rendezvous was with Eve.
Cut in the block of white marble that marked the grass-grown grave were the dearest words in any tongue Wife and Mother; while, for the new-made mound that lay so close beside, the workmen were carving on a companion stone the companion words.
If I turned for consolation to the back of the house, my eyes fell upon the dirty yard of a dirty inn; the half-thatched cow-shed, where two famished animals mourned their hard fate, "chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy;" the chaise, the yellow post-chaise, once the pride and glory of the establishment, now stood reduced from its wheels, and ignominiously degraded to a hen-house; on the grass-grown roof a cock had taken his stand, with an air of protective patronage to the feathered inhabitants beneath: "To what base uses must we come at last."
At last he came to where a little grass-grown path left the road and, passing through a stile and down a hill, led into a little dell and on across a rill in the valley and up the hill on the other side, till it reached a windmill that stood on the cap of the rise where the wind bent the trees in swaying motion.
The street where we dwelt was quite grass-grown and empty; I do not think there were above two inhabited houses in it, nor would you see above half a dozen people go through it, in all the length of the summer's day.
By the Rue de Beurre one regained the Grand' Place, passing through the silent old Place Van den Peereboom in the center of which was the statue of the old Burgomaster of that name. The aspect of this silent grass-grown square behind the Cloth Hall was most impressive.
But soon, in straggling twos and threes, they lagged behind to explore and pluck wall-flowers from the crannies. Girls, feeling the pressure of lovers' arms about their waists, giggled shrilly. They wandered off to shady nooks in the grass-grown ramparts where woolly sheep looked up somnolently to watch them. To the few who remained the old man mumbled on.
Bertram had just been speaking to her, as they sat on the dry sand, of the buried chieftain whose bones still lay hid under that grass-grown barrow, and of the slaughtered wives whose bodies slept beside him, massacred in cold blood to accompany their dead lord to the world of shadows.
The cowboys rode straight across the bench. Song and conversation had ceased and the only sounds were the low clink of bit chains and the soft rustle of horses' feet in the buffalo grass. At the end of an hour the leaders swung into an old grass-grown trail that led by devious windings into a deep, steep-sided coulee along the bottom of which ran the bed of a dried-up creek.
The Bay of Kwang-chou is very fine, affording a safe harbour to the two or three ships that were riding at anchor, or to two or three navies if need came, but Fort Bayard displays as yet few signs of the prophesied greatness. To while away the hours of waiting I went on shore and wandered about the empty, grass-grown roads of the tiny settlement.
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