from the well or brook with pitchers and pails upon
their heads, formed more pleasing objects, and, with
their thin short-gowns and single petticoats, bare
arms, legs, and feet, uncovered heads and braided
hair, somewhat resembled Italian forms of landscape.
Nor could a lover of the picturesque have challenged
either the elegance of their costume or the symmetry
of their shape; although, to say the truth, a mere
Englishman in search of the
comfortable, a word
peculiar to his native tongue, might have wished the
clothes less scanty, the feet and legs somewhat protected
from the weather, the head and complexion shrouded
from the sun, or perhaps might even have thought the
whole person and dress considerably improved by a
plentiful application of spring water, with a quantum
sufficit of soap. The whole scene was depressing;
for it argued, at the first glance, at least a stagnation
of industry, and perhaps of intellect. Even curiosity,
the busiest passion of the idle, seemed of a listless
cast in the village of Tully-Veolan: the curs
aforesaid alone showed any part of its activity; with
the villagers it was passive. They stood, and
gazed at the handsome young officer and his attendant,
but without any of those quick motions and eager looks
that indicate the earnestness with which those who
live in monotonous ease at home look out for amusement
abroad. Yet the physiognomy of the people, when
more closely examined, was far from exhibiting the
indifference of stupidity; their features were rough,
but remarkably intelligent; grave, but the very reverse
of stupid; and from among the young women an artist
might have chosen more than one model whose features
and form resembled those of Minerva. The children
also, whose skins were burnt black, and whose hair
was bleached white, by the influence of the sun, had
a look and manner of life and interest. It seemed,
upon the whole, as if poverty, and indolence, its too
frequent companion, were combining to depress the natural
genius and acquired information of a hardy, intelligent,
and reflecting peasantry.
Some such thoughts crossed Waverley’s mind as
he paced his horse slowly through the rugged and flinty
street of Tully-Veolan, interrupted only in his meditations
by the occasional caprioles which his charger exhibited
at the reiterated assaults of those canine Cossacks,
the collies before mentioned. The village was
more than half a mile long, the cottages being irregularly
divided from each other by gardens, or yards, as the
inhabitants called them, of different sizes, where
(for it is Sixty Years Since) the now universal potato
was unknown, but which were stored with gigantic plants
of kale or colewort, encircled with groves of nettles,
and exhibited here and there a huge hemlock, or the
national thistle, overshadowing a quarter of the petty
inclosure. The broken ground on which the village
was built had never been levelled; so that these inclosures
presented declivities of every degree, here rising