“Allons! Vîte! Vîte! Vîte! Vîte!”
“No, Mounseer, not veat—them’s whoats!”
OUR VILLAGE.
“Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain.”—GOLDSMITH.
I HAVE a great anxiety to become a topographer, and I do not know that I can make an easier commencement of the character, than by attempting a description of our village. It will be found, as my friend the landlord over the way says, that “things are drawn mild.”
I live opposite the Green Man. I know that to be the sign, in spite of the picture, because I am told of the fact in large gilt letters, in three several places. The whole-length portrait of “l’homme verd” is rather imposing. He stands plump before you, in a sort of wrestling attitude, the legs standing distinctly apart, in a brace of decided boots, with dun tops, joined to a pair of creole-coloured leather breeches. The rest of his dress is peculiar; the coat, a two-flapper, green and brown, or, as they say at the tap, half-and-half; a cocked hat on the half cock; a short belt crossing the breast like a flat gas-pipe. The one hand stuck on the greeny-brown hip of my friend, in the other a gun with a barrel like an entire butt, and a butt like a brewer’s whole stock. On one side, looking up at the vanished visage of his master, is all that remains of a liver-and-white pointer—seeming now to be some old dog from India, for his white complexion is turned yellow, and his liver is more than half gone!
The inn is really a very quiet, cozy, comfortable inn, though the landlord announces a fact in larger letters, methinks, than his information warrants, viz., that he is “Licensed to deal in Foreign Wines and Spirits.” All innkeepers, I trust, are so licensed; there is no occasion to make so brazen a brag of this sinecure permit.
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