fowls pecking here and there; a thin predatory dog nosing about; a cart-horse peering from his stable and now and then scraping his hoofs; a very wide woman at the dwelling-house door; the old farmer in blue linen looking on; and there, drawn up, listening to their Captain, row on row of blue-coated men, all hard-bitten, weary, all rather cynical, all weather-stained and frayed, and all ready to go on for ever.

A wigwam of weather-stained canvas stood at the base of some irregularly ascending hills.

"I suppose she takes me for a tourist, or a cheap tripper," thought Stafford, with an uncomfortable kind of amusement; uncomfortable, because he knew that this girl who was acting as shepherd in an old weather-stained habit and a battered hat, was a lady.

It did not occur to him that she might be the daughter of the Mr. Heron to whom the stream belonged and from whose family name the whole dale had taken its own; for, though she had looked and spoken like a lady, the habit, the gauntlets, the soft felt hat were old and weather-stained: and her familiarity with the proper treatment of a sheep in difficulty indicated rather the farmer's daughter than that of the squire.

To go there now was to arrive at an unseemly hour, unkempt and weather-stained, before this uncle whom I had never seen.

Napoleon took three quick little steps towards him in so menacing a fashion, that I saw the weather-stained cheeks of the sailor turn a shade paler, and he gave a helpless glance round him, as if for assistance.

Outside, the Berry cabin was the usual clapboard-roofed, weather-stained structure; inside, it was dark, windowless, and strong with the odor of black folk.

From the main street, with its quaint little shops sheltered from the sun by makeshift verandahs of tattered sacking, weather-stained shingles, or rotting bamboo mats, various little lanes and alleys diverged, leading one into a collection of tumble-down and ruinous huts, set up apparently by chance, and presenting the most incongruous appearance that could possibly be conceived.

Of course the scene was cheerless and unsightly now; lumpy brown patches of earth showed through the unequally melting snow, where the grass-plot should have been; a few naked and ugly sticks were all the promise of the hollyhocks' yellow glory; the bare grape-vine showed on the dingy lattice like a tangled mesh of weather-stained ropes; and "there were no birds in last year's nest" to make the martin-box look social.

The walls were of the dull yellow of weather-stained marble, and the only trees, the dark cypress and moonlit olive.

For all at once the way was barred by about a dozen men in rough weather-stained green jerkins, each with a long bow and a sheaf of arrows at his back, and a long quarter-staff in his hand.

A cottageno, a miniature house, all angles, and of a charming in-and-outness; the walls, old and weather-stained, covered with hollyhocks, roses, honeysuckles, and a great apricot-tree; the casements full of geraniums (oh, there is our superb white cat peeping out from among them!); the closets (our landlord has the assurance to call them rooms) full of contrivances and corner-cupboards; and the little garden behind full of common flowers.

The historical painter of Altenötting was in attendance in the arcade, bearing the votive picture which was to perpetuate the latest miracle of the Black Lady; and as far as I could observe or ascertain of the sacerdotal hangman of the consecrated gallery, the oldest and most weather-stained of the pictures was made to yield precedence to the new comer.

I could not look at their weather-stained faces, with the great moustaches which bristled over their chin-straps, without feeling a glow of confidence, and, between ourselves, I have no doubt that that was exactly how they felt when they saw their young Colonel on his great black war-horse riding at their head.

Less than ten paces from them was the mound, protected by its cairn of stones; and over the stones rose a weather-stained slab in the form of a cross.

All of them had very clean and very close-shaven faces, and very dirty and weather-stained, mud-marked clothes.

This neighborhood is called New Woodstock, but has by no means the brand-new appearance of an American town, being a large village of stone houses, most of them pretty well time-worn and weather-stained.

He was clad in a blue serge jacket, a pair of red breeches smeared at the knees with tar, clean gray worsted stockings, large steel buckles over his coarse square-toed shoes, and beside him, balanced upon the top of a thick oaken cudgel, was a weather-stained silver-laced hat.

Sometimes it was an officer or an official on his way to the capital from Three Rivers or Montreal, sometimes it was a load of skins, with Indians or coureurs-de-bois conveying them down to be shipped to Europe, and sometimes it was a small canoe which bore a sunburned grizzly-haired man, with rusty weather-stained black cassock, who zigzagged from bank to bank, stopping at every Indian hut upon his way.

He was a very small man, so dark and weather-stained that he might have passed for an Indian were it not that he walked and was clad as no Indian had ever been.

Seven or eight stories in height, weather-stained, and dilapidated, the lower floors exhibited handsome porcelain and other costly articles, which gave an impression of wealth in the owners, that astonished those amongst our party who were strangers to the country.

" They came shortly to the little weather-stained house of the widow.

The pillars are of weather-stained marble, and four in number, the two major ones surrounded by antlered stags, the two minor by cressets of carved flame, symbolising the human soul, and the whole illustrating the singular motto of the Chandons, "As the hart desireth."

There was no afternoon promenade where we could, as the Russians say, "show ourselves and see the people"; nor would an exhibition of our tattered and weather-stained garments on a public promenade have been quite the proper thing, had it been possible.

We went immediately into barracksa structure long and low and weather-stained, overlooking the St. Lawrence.