There are many things in the customs of these people that might be made
very beautiful, if the sense of beauty were as much alive now as it must
have been when these customs were first imagined and adopted.
I must not forget, among these little descriptive items, the spectacle of
women and girls bearing huge bundles of twigs and shrubs, or grass, with
scarlet poppies and blue flowers intermixed; the bundles sometimes so
huge as almost to hide the woman's figure from head to heel, so that she
looked like a locomotive mass of verdure and flowers; sometimes reaching
only half-way down her back, so as to show the crooked knife slung
behind, with which she had been reaping this strange harvest-sheaf. A
Pre-Raphaelite painter--the one, for instance, who painted the heap of
autumnal leaves, which we saw at the Manchester Exhibition--would find an
admirable subject in one of these girls, stepping with a free, erect, and
graceful carriage, her burden on her head; and the miscellaneous herbage
and flowers would give him all the scope he could desire for minute and
various delineation of nature.
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