Below him was a dirty court, where dirty children fought and played
together, filling the reeking air with their shrill clamor, while
slatternly women stood gossiping in ragged groups with grimy hands
on hips, or with arms rolled up in dingy aprons. And Barnabas
noticed that the dirty children and gossiping women turned very
often to stare and point up at a certain window a little further
along the court, and he idly wondered why.
It had been a day of stifling heat, and even now, though evening was
at hand, he breathed an air close and heavy and foul with a thousand
impurities.
Now as he leaned there, with his earnest gaze bent ever across the
River, Barnabas sighed, bethinking him of clean, white, country roads,
of murmuring brooks and rills, of the cool green shades of dewy
woods full of the fragrance of hidden flower and herb and sweet,
moist earth. But most of all he bethought him of a certain wayside
inn, an ancient inn of many gables, above whose hospitable door
swung a sign whereon a weather-beaten hound, dim-legged and faded of
tail, pursued a misty blur that by common report was held to be hare;
a comfortable, homely inn of no especial importance perhaps, yet the
very best inn to be found in all broad England, none the less.
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