The Judge, whose eyes were filled with happy tears, partly at the real
relief to his circumstances accomplished by Vesta's great sacrifice, and
partly by the scene just closed, of her natural honor and fidelity to
the man who had forced her wedding vows from her, took the northern
course and crossed the little bridge, and as he went up the hill the
environs of the town and the town itself spread out behind him in the
stillness of the Sabbath, and the quails and fall birds piped and
cackled low in the corn and the grain stubble. Some wild-geese in the
south flew over the low gray woods towards the bay; a pack of hounds
somewhere bayed like distant music; he heard the turkeys gobble, at one
of the adjacent farms on the swells in the marshy landscape, where
abundance, not otherwise denoted, showed in the fat poultry that roosted
in the trees like living fruit and spoke apoplectically.
While he drank in the wine of autumn on the air, that had a bare taste
of frost, like the first acid in the sweet cider, he saw a carriage or
two come over the level roads towards Princess Anne, and the church-bell
told their errand as it dropped into the serenity its fruity twang, like
a pippin rolling from the bough. So easily, so musically, so regularly
it rang, like the voice of something pure, that was steady even in its
joys, that the Judge took off his broad white fur hat, as if to a lady,
and listened with something between courtesy and piety.
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