Chapter 56

Chapter 6

A CRY FOR HELP

The Paper Mill had stopped work for the night, and the paths and
roads in its neighbourhood were sprinkled with clusters of people
going home from their day's labour in it. There were men, women,
and children in the groups, and there was no want of lively colour
to flutter in the gentle evening wind. The mingling of various
voices and the sound of laughter made a cheerful impression upon
the ear, analogous to that of the fluttering colours upon the eye.
Into the sheet of water reflecting the flushed sky in the foreground
of the living picture, a knot of urchins were casting stones, and
watching the expansion of the rippling circles. So, in the rosy
evening, one might watch the ever-widening beauty of the
landscape--beyond the newly-released workers wending home--
beyond the silver river--beyond the deep green fields of corn, so
prospering, that the loiterers in their narrow threads of pathway
seemed to float immersed breast-high--beyond the hedgerows and
the clumps of trees--beyond the windmills on the ridge--away to
where the sky appeared to meet the earth, as if there were no
immensity of space between mankind and Heaven.

It was a Saturday evening, and at such a time the village dogs,
always much more interested in the doings of humanity than in the
affairs of their own species, were particularly active. At the
general shop, at the butcher's and at the public-house, they evinced
an inquiring spirit never to he satiated. Their especial interest in
the public-house would seem to imply some latent rakishness in
the canine character; for little was eaten there, and they, having no
taste for beer or tobacco (Mrs Hubbard's dog is said to have
smoked, but proof is wanting), could only have been attracted by
sympathy with loose convivial habits. Moreover, a most wretched
fiddle played within; a fiddle so unutterably vile, that one lean
long-bodied cur, with a better ear than the rest, found himself
under compulsion at intervals to go round the corner and howl.
Yet, even he returned to the public-house on each occasion with
the tenacity of a confirmed drunkard.

Fearful to relate, there was even a sort of little Fair in the village.
Some despairing gingerbread that had been vainly trying to dispose
of itself all over the country, and had cast a quantity of dust upon
its head in its mortification, again appealed to the public from an
infirm booth. So did a heap of nuts, long, long exiled from
Barcelona, and yet speaking English so indifferently as to call
fourteen of themselves a pint. A Peep-show which had originally
started with the Battle of Waterloo, and had since made it every
other battle of later date by altering the Duke of Wellington's nose,