Chapter 19 - Page 2

suddenly and mysteriously as they had come. They were bound for the
other side of the river to work. This path had been traveled by many
generations of these people. They have always gone down to the valley to
earn their bread, but they have always climbed their hill again to eat
it, and to sleep in their snug town.

It is said that the Dilsbergers do not emigrate much; they find that
living up there above the world, in their peaceful nest, is pleasanter
than living down in the troublous world. The seven hundred inhabitants
are all blood-kin to each other, too; they have always been blood-kin to
each other for fifteen hundred years; they are simply one large family,
and they like the home folks better than they like strangers, hence they
persistently stay at home. It has been said that for ages Dilsberg
has been merely a thriving and diligent idiot-factory. I saw no idiots
there, but the captain said, "Because of late years the government has
taken to lugging them off to asylums and otherwheres; and government
wants to cripple the factory, too, and is trying to get these
Dilsbergers to marry out of the family, but they don't like to."

The captain probably imagined all this, as modern science denies that
the intermarrying of relatives deteriorates the stock.

Arrived within the wall, we found the usual village sights and life. We
moved along a narrow, crooked lane which had been paved in the Middle
Ages. A strapping, ruddy girl was beating flax or some such stuff in
a little bit of a good-box of a barn, and she swung her flail with a
will--if it was a flail; I was not farmer enough to know what she was
at; a frowsy, barelegged girl was herding half a dozen geese with
a stick--driving them along the lane and keeping them out of the
dwellings; a cooper was at work in a shop which I know he did not make
so large a thing as a hogshead in, for there was not room. In the front
rooms of dwellings girls and women were cooking or spinning, and ducks
and chickens were waddling in and out, over the threshold, picking up
chance crumbs and holding pleasant converse; a very old and wrinkled
man sat asleep before his door, with his chin upon his breast and his
extinguished pipe in his lap; soiled children were playing in the dirt
everywhere along the lane, unmindful of the sun.

Except the sleeping old man, everybody was at work, but the place was
very still and peaceful, nevertheless; so still that the distant
cackle of the successful hen smote upon the ear but little dulled
by intervening sounds. That commonest of village sights was lacking
here--the public pump, with its great stone tank or trough of limpid
water, and its group of gossiping pitcher-bearers; for there is no well
or fountain or