Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/163

160 next window sits the selfsame pretty young woman that I saw knitting alone there all last Sunday. It is a happy art that distils contentment out of a passive condition and dull employment The street is thronging with fair blooming peasant-girls come into town to pass their Sunday holyday. How very neat they look with their white linen caps and gay ribands, and full, dark-blue petticoats, so full that they hang from top to bottom like a fluted ruffle. The bodice is of the same material, and sets off in pretty contrast the plaited, snow-white shift-sleeve. There are the duke's soldiers mingling among them; their gallants, I suppose. Their deportment is cheerful and decorous.

"Here is a group of healthy-looking little girls in holyday suit, their long, thick hair well combed, braided, and prettily coiled, and a little worked worsted sack hanging over one shoulder. The visiters of Wiesbaden—German, Russian, English— are passing to and fro; some taking their Sunday drive, some on foot. Beneath my window, in a small, triangular garden, is a touching chapter in human life; the whole book, indeed, from the beginning almost to the end. There is a table under the trees in the universal German fashion, and wine and Sezlter-water on it; and there, in his armchair, sits an old blind man, with his children, and grandchildren, and the blossoms of yet another generation around him. While I write it, the young people are touching their glasses to his, clambered up behind him and is holding a rose to his ibis nose."