DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.62134#0115
STREET WOOD-CUTTERS.
107
number, and the procession was rendered yet more fantastic
from gay-coloured dresses and white petticoats, borne aloft
like pennons upon long poles ! All bright and fresh in the
clear winter’s morning, their comely faces glowing with
exercise and the sharp air, their gowns and gay hand-
kerchiefs as clean and bright as their faces, these laundress-
maids and matrons looked wondrously attractive. Just
picture to yourself this train winding along through the
old street, white and crisp with its snow, and tell me
whether, together with a pea-green sledge rushing along
here and there, and every now and then a group of
peasants, men and women, cutting up wood before the
houses, the scene was not quaint and pleasantly foreign ?
These groups of cutters of wood are very amusing. The
man—for the group usually consists of one man and two
women—the man in a chocolate or pale pink cotton jacket,
black velvet breeches, and black top-boots, chopping away
upon a heavy block which he has placed upon the causeway;
the women in pink or blue cotton boddices, with large
wadded gigot sleeves, and scarlet or green, or scarlet and
green mixed, woollen petticoats, and with black or white
kerchiefs tied over their heads, one sawing pieces of wood
in a skeleton-like sawing machine, the other carrying away,
in a wooden basket on her back, the cut and sawn pieces of
wood through the heavy arched door or rather gateway of
the house.
But to return to sledging and to our sledging. On
Tuesday afternoon the sun shone out gloriously, and cast-
ing long gleams on the studio floor through the high
windows, my eyes glanced up and encountered, smiling
through leafless branches flecked with snow, such a lapis-
lazuli heaven that I forthwith put away my drawing, and
some twenty minutes later stood in our little sitting-room,
startling Isabel with my exclamation of “ On with your
107
number, and the procession was rendered yet more fantastic
from gay-coloured dresses and white petticoats, borne aloft
like pennons upon long poles ! All bright and fresh in the
clear winter’s morning, their comely faces glowing with
exercise and the sharp air, their gowns and gay hand-
kerchiefs as clean and bright as their faces, these laundress-
maids and matrons looked wondrously attractive. Just
picture to yourself this train winding along through the
old street, white and crisp with its snow, and tell me
whether, together with a pea-green sledge rushing along
here and there, and every now and then a group of
peasants, men and women, cutting up wood before the
houses, the scene was not quaint and pleasantly foreign ?
These groups of cutters of wood are very amusing. The
man—for the group usually consists of one man and two
women—the man in a chocolate or pale pink cotton jacket,
black velvet breeches, and black top-boots, chopping away
upon a heavy block which he has placed upon the causeway;
the women in pink or blue cotton boddices, with large
wadded gigot sleeves, and scarlet or green, or scarlet and
green mixed, woollen petticoats, and with black or white
kerchiefs tied over their heads, one sawing pieces of wood
in a skeleton-like sawing machine, the other carrying away,
in a wooden basket on her back, the cut and sawn pieces of
wood through the heavy arched door or rather gateway of
the house.
But to return to sledging and to our sledging. On
Tuesday afternoon the sun shone out gloriously, and cast-
ing long gleams on the studio floor through the high
windows, my eyes glanced up and encountered, smiling
through leafless branches flecked with snow, such a lapis-
lazuli heaven that I forthwith put away my drawing, and
some twenty minutes later stood in our little sitting-room,
startling Isabel with my exclamation of “ On with your