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On all sides vast pleasure domains, kept up at great cost, surround it. From the upper part, the weathercocks of twenty chateaux may be seen.
By the way, a natural weathercock instead of the gilded vane, as defined by Brown, would have been a rara avis: "A kingfisher hanged by the bill, converting the breast to that point of the horizon whence the wind doth blow, is a very strange introducing of natural weathercocks."
Beneath them, in the shadow of the hills, lay the valley, like a fathomless, black gulf; and above were the cloistered stars, that, nun-like, walk the holy aisles of heaven. The city was asleep in the valley below; all asleep and silent, save the clocks, that had just struck twelve, and the veering, golden weathercocks, that were swimming in the moonshine, like golden fishes, in a glass vase.
What vain weathercocks we are! I, who had determined to hold myself independent of all social intercourse, and thanked my stars that, at length, I had lighted on a spot where it was next to impracticable I, weak wretch, after maintaining till dusk a struggle with low spirits and solitude, was finally compelled to strike my colours; and under pretence of gaining information concerning the necessities of my establishment, I desired Mrs.
Two days after we arrived at the island of Ruach; and I swear to you, by the celestial hen and chickens, that I found the way of living of the people so strange and wonderful that I can't, for the heart's blood of me, half tell it you. They live on nothing but wind, eat nothing but wind, and drink nothing but wind. They have no other houses but weathercocks.
The wife trembled, the husband groaned, the tempest outside shook the window-panes, the weathercocks creaked on the roof, the owls hooted in the lofts, and so the night wore on. It was only toward morning that sleep sank down upon the young wife's weary eyelids.
He despised those, considering them piping birds of trifling stature ordinary song birds. The pigeons, he allowed, were big and shining, and gleamed like mother-o'-pearl, and looked like a kind of weathercocks; but then they were fat and stupid, and their whole endeavour was to fill themselves with food. "Moreover, they are tedious things to converse with," said the Weathercock.
The roof was surmounted by two weathercocks: one displaying the eagle of Russia, and the other the eagle of France. The two outer doors were also surmounted by the eagles of the two countries. "The raft was precisely in the middle of the river, with the two doors of the salon facing the two opposite banks.
About seven miles from Argentan one passes Fromentelle, a quiet hamlet full of thatched cottages and curious weathercocks, and then five miles further on, having descended into the valley of the little river Rouvre, Briouze is entered.
You see their native houses, long bamboo structures raised on piles and thatched with grass, with low eaves sloping nearly to the ground. In sylvan glades sacred to the nats you pass wooden pillars erected by the roadside, rudely cut, and rudely painted with lines and squares and rough figures of knives, and close beside them conical grass structures with coloured weathercocks.
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