yet visible without. Within the avenue and bank was a wall more or
less discontinuous, and within the wall were packed the abodes of the
burghers.

Though the two women did not know it these external features were but
the ancient defences of the town, planted as a promenade.

The lamplights now glimmered through the engirdling trees, conveying a
sense of great smugness and comfort inside, and rendering at the same
time the unlighted country without strangely solitary and vacant in
aspect, considering its nearness to life. The difference between burgh
and champaign was increased, too, by sounds which now reached them above
others--the notes of a brass band. The travellers returned into the High
Street, where there were timber houses with overhanging stories,
whose small-paned lattices were screened by dimity curtains on a
drawing-string, and under whose bargeboards old cobwebs waved in the
breeze. There were houses of brick-nogging, which derived their chief
support from those adjoining. There were slate roofs patched with tiles,
and tile roofs patched with slate, with occasionally a roof of thatch.

The agricultural and pastoral character of the people upon whom the town
depended for its existence was shown by the class of objects displayed
in the shop windows. Scythes, reap-hooks, sheep-shears, bill-hooks,
spades, mattocks, and hoes at the iron-monger's; bee-hives,
butter-firkins, churns, milking stools and pails, hay-rakes,
field-flagons, and seed-lips at the cooper's; cart-ropes and
plough-harness at the saddler's; carts, wheel-barrows, and mill-gear at
the wheelwright's and machinist's, horse-embrocations at the chemist's;
at the glover's and leather-cutter's, hedging-gloves, thatchers'
knee-caps, ploughmen's leggings, villagers' pattens and clogs.