gewgaws nor the license of time.

And sometimes it was close to a picture of beauty. When the village
celebrated its yearly _pardon_, a great procession came out of the
church--priests in glittering robes, young men in their gala costume of
black and silver, holding flashing standards aloft, and many maidens in
flapping white head-dress and collar, black frocks and aprons flaunting
with ribbons and lace. They marched, chanting, down the road beside the
wall of the cemetery, where lay the generations that in their day had
held the banners and chanted the service of the _pardon_. For the dead
were peasants and priests--the Croisacs had their burying-place in a
hollow of the hills behind the castle--old men and women who had wept
and died for the fishermen that had gone to the _grande pêche_ and
returned no more, and now and again a child, slept there. Those who
walked past the dead at the _pardon_, or after the marriage ceremony, or
took part in any one of the minor religious festivals with which the
Catholic village enlivens its existence--all, young and old, looked
grave and sad. For the women from childhood know that their lot is to
wait and dread and weep, and the men that the ocean is treacherous and
cruel, but that bread can be wrung from no other master. Therefore the
living have little sympathy for the dead who have laid down their
crushing burden; and the dead under their stones slumber contentedly
enough. There is no envy among them for the young who wander at evening
and pledge their troth in the Bois d'Amour, only pity for the groups of
women who wash their linen in the creek that flows to the river. They
look like pictures in the green quiet book of nature, these women, in
their glistening white head-gear and deep collars; but the dead know
better than to envy them, and the women--and the lovers--know better
than to pity the dead.