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A shepherd and shepherdess who had been friends with Rosalind, when she was herself disguised as a shepherd, were married on the same day, and all with such pretty feastings and merrymakings as could be nowhere within four walls, but only in the beautiful green wood. Leontes was the King of Sicily, and his dearest friend was Polixenes, King of Bohemia.

This is all I have to tell ye respecting the false alarm, and I hope ye are satisfied. The last fifty years of mortal regeneration and improvement have effected more changes in the old fasts, and feasts, and merrymakings of Scotland, than twice and twice over that time of any other period since it became a nation.

Some time in the early spring of 1760, Thomas Jefferson, then a lad in the College of William and Mary, was surprised by the arrival in Williamsburg of his jovial acquaintance, Patrick Henry, and still more by the announcement of the latter that, in the brief interval since their merrymakings together at Hanover, he had found time to study law, and had actually come up to the capital to seek an admission to the bar.

And, indeed, when all the independent trappers are driven by the appearance of winter into this delightful retreat, and the whole Snake village, two thousand or three thousand strong, impelled by the same necessity, pitch their lodges around the fort and the dances and merrymakings of a long winter are thoroughly commenced, there is no want of customers."

They sing it in chorus on the quays while hauling the cargo, they sing it in the factory, they chant on the weary, endless steppes, reaping the corn they may not eat. It is of the good time their masters are having, of the feastings and the merrymakings, of the laughter of the children, of the kisses of the lovers. But the last line of every verse is the same.

Just sufficient snow had fallen during the night to give that semblance of winter to the house-tops and hedge-rows, with a faint white powdering of the roadway and pavement, which adds so much to the quondam season of family gatherings, merrymakings, and plum-pudding; and this, King Frost had hardened by his patent adamantine process, so that it might not cause any inconvenience to foot passengers or lose its virgin freshness; while, at the same time, he decked and bedizened each separate twig and branch of the poor, leafless, skeleton trees with rare festal jewels and ear-drops of glittering icicles; besides weaving fantastic devices of goblin castles and airy, feathery foliage on the window panes, fairy armies in martial array and delicate gnome-tracery transforming their appearance from that of ordinary glass into brilliantly-embroidered flakes of transparent, lucent crystal.

After this there were great rejoicings and merrymakings, but when a few days had passed away in feasting, the farmer became restless, and begged to be allowed to take his daughter home with him for a short visit, in order to convince his wife the girl was well and happy.

Nobody can live there today by making verses, and the representative of the jongleur, who once sang from castle to castle to the accompaniment of the mediaeval fiddle, and who was so heartily welcomed at all the baronial feasts and merrymakings, is now a wandering beggar, who gathers crusts from the peasants by his rude minstrelsy, that changes from the pious to the obscene, or from the obscene to the pious, as the character and taste of the audience may decide.

Neither she nor Toni took any part in the village merrymakings. Why should they? He was thirty and she twenty-five. They might have married ten years ago had not the elder brother gone away. Toni secretly feared that the time would never come when they would be man and wife, but he patiently labored on earning his two lire, or at most two lire and a half, a day.

Nobody did any more work than it pleased him to do; everybody was well-fed and happy; the women were beautiful and chaste; the men were bold, fiery, spirited, gracefully idle; life was a succession of picturesque merrymakings, lovemakings, intrigues, visits, lavish hospitalities, harmless politics, and revolutions. To be sure, there were but few signs of progressive spirit.