know that Villeneuve witnessed that incident, but it looks and smells
old enough to have done so. It is reasonably picturesque in a
semi-Italian, semi-French fashion, but it is to the nose that it makes
its chief appeal. Every house has a cherished manure heap in its back
yard, symmetrically shaped, with the projecting edges of the straw
neatly braided: it is a source of family pride as well as profit. But it
is chiefly the odor of world-old human occupation, otherwise
indescribable, that pervades the air of Villeneuve, and makes the
mildest of foreign sojourners long for the application of a little
dynamite to its ancient houses. Our towns are perhaps the ugliest in the
world, but how open to the sun and wind they are! how free, how pure,
how wholesome!

On week-days a cart sometimes passed through Villeneuve with a most
disproportionate banging over the cobble-stones, but usually the walls
reverberated the soft tinkle of cow-bells as the kine wound through from
pasture to pasture and lingered at the fountains. On Sundays the street
was reasonably full of young men in the peg-top trousers which the Swiss
still cling to, making eyes at the girls in the upper windows. These
were the only times when I saw women of any age idle. Sometimes through
the open door I caught a glimpse of a group of them busy with their
work, while a little girl read to them. Once in a crowded café, where
half a hundred men were smoking and drinking and chattering, the girl
who served my coffee put down a volume of Victor Hugo's poems to bring
it. But mostly their literary employments did not go beyond driving the
cows to pasture and washing clothes in the lake, where they beat the
linen with far-echoing blows of their paddles. They helped to make the
hay on the marshes beyond the village, and they greatly outnumbered the
men in the labors of the vintage. They were seldom pretty either in face
or figure; they seemed all to have some stage of goitre; but their