eBooks Base 2000

The broad-brimmed, high-crowned hat of Tuscan
straw is the customary female head-dress, and is as unbecoming as can
possibly be imagined, and of little use, one would suppose, as a shelter
from the sun, the brim continually blowing upward from the face. Some of
the elder women wore black felt hats, likewise broad-brimmed; and the men
wore felt hats also, shaped a good deal like a mushroom, with hardly any
brim at all. The scenes in the villages through which we passed were
very lively and characteristic, all the population seeming to be out of
doors: some at the butcher's shop, others at the well; a tailor sewing in
the open air, with a young priest sitting sociably beside him; children
at play; women mending clothes, embroidering, spinning with the distaff
at their own doorsteps; many idlers, letting the pleasant morning pass in
the sweet-do-nothing; all assembling in the street, as in the common room
of one large household, and thus brought close together, and made
familiar with one another, as they can never be in a different system
of society.


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