1847. 
THE CULTIVATOR. 
307 
at the side are two or three more. The house is of 
rough stone covered with mortar, and the floor is cov¬ 
ered with baked tiles, glossed over with grease, and 
wax, and filth. A rough made spade or plow, will 
perhaps be lying at the door—a child or two will look 
over the fence at you, and a short woman, with very 
thick, stout sabots,* will clump to the door, (which she 
nearly fills up,) and look curiously after you, shading 
her eyes with her hand. The garden is carelessly cul¬ 
tivated, and filled only with the more necessary vege¬ 
tables. It is separated by a rude paling from the 
vineyard or grass-land behind. 
The road now becomes paved, perhaps with round 
stones, and a paling or hedge of singular growth skirts 
the way until you come to other cottages, similar in 
general construction to the first. ' Some more pretend¬ 
ing one will have a dried bough hanging over the door, 
which means that you can there get wine and lodging, 
and possibly, if not fastidious, a bed. If the village 
and inn be quite small, you will be received in the 
kitchen, which is the most pretending room in the 
house, furnished with a large fire-place, with its ad¬ 
juncts of kettles and fry-pans, and a very large oak 
table with oaken benches. The village innkeeper or 
aubergiste, has not unfrequently a considerable patch 
of land to cultivate, and his garden-spot will be of 
larger size than that of the other villagers ; but I 
never could see that his profession as aubergiste helped 
his profession as farmer or gardener. If they have 
better wine, they do not make it, and if they have bet¬ 
ter cheese, it is the cheese of Gruyere. 
If the village be large, the inn will have a huge 
white stable, with an announcement over its door, in 
staring capitals, of the number of horses that can be 
kept. Great piles of manure will be smoking about its 
door in the sun, and none of those economic arrange¬ 
ments for saving and securing fertilizing material can 
be observed, which prevail throughout Belgium and 
Holland. 
The inn, as well as all the houses around it, which 
make up the central part of the village, will be imme¬ 
diately upon the street. The little shops of such 
clumsy working artisans as belong to the village, will 
be a part of, or united to their houses ; and their han¬ 
dicraft will make so lazy and lifeless a show, that it 
will add little to the bustle of the place. Perhaps 
twenty little cottages, such as I have first described, 
with the auberge and the church, group together to 
form the village ; then comes a straggling house or 
two—possibly of somewhat better appearance, as be¬ 
longing to the priest or village grocer, then will recur 
again the unfenced vineyards and grain fields. 
The cows, which supply the villagers with their milk 
and butter, which last is, in many of the interior dis¬ 
tricts, villainously poor, are fed beside the way, watch¬ 
ed by knitting girls, or bare-legged boys, and at the 
milking are possibly treated with a cabbage leaf or 
two from the little garden, and housed under a rough 
shed attached to the cottage. 
These villagers have all their steady and unvarying 
employments. Perhaps one is a roulage f man, mak¬ 
ing his monthly trips through the village, from Paris, 
on to the borders of Switzerland, and supplying his 
family with such proportion of his small profits as is 
* A heavy wooden shoe, cut out of beech or linden wood, pointed 
at the toe, and with high, small heels, worn .almost universally by 
the peasantry of France. They of course make a prodigious clat¬ 
tering, and you frequently, on the pavement of a town, turn about, 
thinking a horse is at your heels, at the sound only of some active 
country beauty. 
t The roulage is a cart with two wheels, drawn by from two to 
eight horses, which transports heavy frieght from town to town, 
and even from country to country, doing the same duty which, be¬ 
fore the days of railroads, used to be performed by our heavy 
Pennsylvania wagons. 
not needed to supply his evening’s pipe, and his daily 
bottle of wine. 
Another, perhaps occupying the very humblest of t he 
cottages, is a stone-breaker upon the highway, and 
spends year upon year, on his little cross-legged stool, 
beating pebbles for the Mc-Adamized road, and chat¬ 
ting with such foot-goers as pa,ss by his way. Another 
is a soldier, enrolled in la grande arm.ee, and living now 
at Paris, and the next year at Strasburg, and the next, 
fighting the Algerines. 
There are the day-laborers, going miles' to their har¬ 
vesting, or their work in the vineyards, and carrying 
with them their coarse wheaten loaf, a bit of cheese, 
and canteen of wine, to make gay their hour’s nooning 
under the poplars. In the grape-time, of course there 
will be added the richest fruit at will, which is eaten 
without stint, and, so far as I could observe (and my 
own experience confirms the observation,) with entire 
harmlessness. The country shop, if any exist in the 
village, will be of that unpretending and mixed sort 
which may be found in the smaller towns of New Eng¬ 
land—with this marked exception, however, that since 
the French peasantry have the good sense to dress in 
a way becoming their labor and style, you will see in 
the shops none of the second-rate, flimsy finery of cities ; 
their fete day dresses are of clean homespun, and they 
make show of their success in labor or in life, not by 
wearing gaudy ribbons, and assuming ill-fitting fash¬ 
ions—but by uniform cheerfulness and urbanity. 
The young men of the village have no El Dorado of 
1 the West’ to lure them away ; they are stimulated by 
no freely circulating, every day newspapers ; an im¬ 
provement in agriculture or in trade is slow to reach 
them. Half, perhaps, are taken away into the army; 
the ambitious ones of the residue, burn for some igno¬ 
ble employment at the great capital ; or succeed a 
father to the conduct of a roulage convoy ; or push 
their influence to. secure a place as postillion in a 
neighboring town ; or as driver to a diligence team— 
hoping that some day, and it is the height of their am¬ 
bition, they may arrive at the dignity of conductor, 
and wear their braided jackets and tasselled caps—in 
which event their occasional visits to their native vil¬ 
lage is an important event, and they will carry away 
the hearts of all the pretty maidens of the country. 
Thus the French village, without any elements of 
progress, passes a stationary and sleepy existence. It 
is the same this year that it was thirty years ago—the 
same church, the same rude image of the virgin—the 
same auberge—changed only in having a new bough 
shaking at the door, and perhaps a new crane to fry 
its omelettes, and to boil the- pot. The same notions 
prevail of sowing and of harvest—and the same igno¬ 
rant carelessness, and the same innocent, gaieties. 
Though this little picture of a country village in 
other lands, is not strictly agricultural, I have thought 
American village-livers would be’ glad to see and enjoy 
the fortunate contrast which their position will enable 
them to make, and so, take new courage for exertion, 
and wear new modesty in their successes. 
A Soldier’s opinion of War.—Sir Henry Smith, 
“ the hero of Aliwal,” in a speech at the late meeting 
of the Royal Agricultural Society, in comparing the 
pursuit of agriculture with the business of war, said : 
“ Let me impress upon you that, though my profession 
be one of arms, yet it is an accursed; profession, and is 
of utility alone when it is used to promote the legiti¬ 
mate object of war—a lasting peace.” He also as¬ 
sured the audience that if they had viewed “ the ac¬ 
cursed horrors of war,” as he had done, they would 
have more occasion to be contented with their voca 
tion. 
