IX. THE COL DE LA FAUCILLE 157

each with its courtyard and richly trellised garden. The commercial square, with the main street of traverse, consisted of uncompetitive shops, such as were needful, of the native wares: cloth and hosiery spun, woven, and knitted within the walls; cheese of neighbouring Neufchâtel;¹ fruit of their own gardens, bread from the fields above the green coteaux; meat of their herds, untainted by American tin; smith’s work of sufficient scythe and ploughshare, hammered on the open anvil; groceries dainty, the coffee generally roasting odoriferously in the street, before the door; for the modistes,-well, perhaps a bonnet or two from Paris, the rest, wholesome dress for peasant and dame of Ponthieu.² Above the prosperous, serenely busy and beneficent shop, the old dwelling-house of its ancestral masters; pleasantly carved, proudly roofed, keeping its place, and order, and recognized function, unfailing, unenlarging, for centuries. Round all, the breezy ramparts, with their long waving avenues; through all, in variously circuiting cleanness and sweetness of navigable river and active millstream, the green chalk-water of the Somme.

My most intense happinesses have of course been among mountains. But for cheerful, unalloyed, unwearying pleasure, the getting in sight of Abbeville on a fine summer afternoon, jumping out in the courtyard of the Hotel de I’Europe, and rushing down the street to see St. Wulfran again before the sun was off the towers, are things to cherish the past for,-to the end.³

¹ [Neufchâtel-en-Bray, some miles south-west of Abbeville; still celebrated for its cream-cheeses, called bondons.]

² [The ancient district of France in which Abbeville is situated; comprising parts of the present departments of the Somme and Pas-de-Calais.]

³ [Here, again, the proof has an additional passage marked by Ruskin “Keep”:-

“One great part of the pleasure, however, depended on an idiosyncrasy which extremely wise people do not share,-my love of all sorts of filigree and embroidery, from hoarfrost to the high clouds. The intricacies of virgin silver, of arborescent gold, the weaving of birds’-nests, the netting of lace, the basket capitals of Byzantium, and most of all the tabernacle work of the French flamboyant school, possessed from the first, and possess still, a charm for me of which the force was entirely unbroken for ten years after the first sight of Rouen; and the fastidious structural knowledge of later time does not always repay the partial loss of it.”

Compare below, p. 623.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]