beheld so lively a company of washerwomen as were beating their clothes
in Vire River. The river bends prettily just below the St. Lo heights,
as if it had gone out of its way to courtesy to a hill. But even the
waters, in their haste to be polite, could not course beneath the great
bridge as swiftly as ran those women's tongues. There were a good
hundred of them at work beneath the washing-sheds. Now, these sheds,
anywhere in France, are really the open-air club room of the French
peasant woman; the whole dish of the village gossip is hung out to dry,
having previously been well soused and aired, along with the blouses
and the coarse chemises. The town of St. Lo had evidently furnished
these club members of the washing-stones with some fat dish of
gossip--the heads were as close as currants on a stem, as they bent in
groups over the bright waters. They had told it all to the stream; and
the stream rolled the volume of the talk along as it carried along also
the gay, sparkling reflections of the life and the toil that bent over
it--of the myriad reflections of those moving, bare-armed figures, of
the brilliant kerchiefs, of the wet blue and gray jerseys, and of the
long prismatic line of the damp, motley-hued clothes that were
fluttering in the wind.

The bells' clangor was an assurance that something was happening on top
of the hill. Just what happened was as altogether pleasing a spectacle,
after a long and arduous climb up a hillside, as it has often been my
good fortune to encounter.

The portals of the church of Notre Dame were wide open. Within, as we
looked over the shoulders of the townspeople who, like us, had come to
see what the bells meant by their ringing, within the church there was
a rich and sombre dusk; out of this dusk, indistinctly at first, lit
by the tremulous flicker of a myriad of candles, came a line of