Page:Georges Eekhoud - Escal Vigor, a novel.djvu/38

14 bring to his house-warming their wives and daughters.

All the guests, both men and women, had dressed themselves at his particular request, either in the national costume, or in their personal uniform. The men arrayed themselves in velvet vests of a reddish-brown colour, or of a blinding red, worn over embroidered flannels on which were represented the instruments of their profession, anchors, ploughing implements, bulls' heads, navigators' instruments, sunflowers, sea-gulls, the almost oriental medley of colours standing out with peculiar effect on the sea-blue ground, like armorial bearings on a shield. On their broad, red belts shone old silver buckles of a workmanship at once barbarous and touching; others exhibited the sculptured oaken handles of their broad clasp-knives; the sea folk paraded in great tarred boots; delicate metal rings adorned the lobe of their ears, which were as red as shellfish: the farm labourers wore trousers of the same velvet as their vests, and these trousers, tight above, enlarged from the calf to the instep after the style known as "bell-bottoms." Their small hat recalled that of the lawyers' clerks of the time of Louis XI. The