Moulins

“ Somewhere in that honeycomb of moulins, cabarets, penny-shows, spectacles, revues, tiny theatres with sensational rococo façades and cafés with fantastic names dedicated to the riotous and the risqué, diversion is bound to be forthcoming for any amusement hunter blasé with the usual. All the way down from the quaint little shops and crooked, cobble-stoned streets of the rustic upper region above the Moulin de la Galette to the blazing purlieus of the Place de Clichy and the Place Pigalle, there is always something on hand at midnight to amaze the neophyte. ”

“ As she did not think so, I was determined to know why. "We will go to the Hotel de l'Europe, if you press it;" and away the cabriolet joggled over the roughly paved street.
Moulins is any thing but one of the [482] most remarkable towns in France: it is large, and yet it is not important: as a centre of communication, nothing: little trade: few manufactures: the houses are low, rather than high; the streets wide, rather than narrow: you can breathe in Moulins, though you may be stifled in Rouen. It is the quiet chef lieu of the Allier, and was once the capital of the Bourbonnais. ”

“ L'eau est tellement chaude qu'on cuit dedans les œufs hard en trois minutes. Au milieu de ce ravin sur le torrent principal il y a trois moulins, l'un au-dessus de l'autre, qui sont construits d'une manière toute particulière et très pittoresque. Toute la journée les femmes tartares ne cessent de venir au-dessus et au-dessous de ces moulins pour laver leur linge. II faut vous dire qu'elles lavent avec les pieds. C'est comme une fourmilière toujours remuante. Les femmes sont pour la plupart belles et bien faites. Les costumes des femmes orientales malgré leur pauvreté, sont gracieux. ”

“ With keenly searching eyes, as they jogged on [138]
To Moulins. Birds and Duke and horse could see,
Against the sky, that old square prison-tower,
The tall cathedral, the dark gabled roofs,
Thronging together behind its moated wall ”

“ Moulin—the windmill about whose dusty portals for centuries had gathered the quaint characters of the district, and where, now that its traffic was forever departed, the young Alphonse first began to distinguish man from man in the stories told him by the ancients of the province.
“Excellent people, blessed house!” he writes. “How often have I repaired thither in the winter to recuperate in the embrace of nature, to heal myself of Paris and its fevers in the wholesome emanations of our little Provençal hills.” ”

“ Coming upon the lodge now, you see only a mound of white swelling above the expanse of pond or beaver meadow, and beyond stand ranks of evergreen, dark and silent. That mound is as dull or dead as anything else in the somber landscape until, as you pass indifferently, your eye catches a wisp of vapor, like a breath, or your ear detects a faint plop, plop, as bodies slide down into the tunnel one after another. In an instant the whole landscape changes, as it always does change, and glow and fall away into the golden frame of a picture, when a living creature moves across the face of it. ”

“ Molly and May walked along a narrow path close beside the glass wall, and watched the queer fish chase each other about in the water or lie lazily under the shadow of a big rock.
At last Molly said, "Why, the bottom of the ocean looks very much like the top of the earth. There are hills and valleys and rocks and sand and green things growing everywhere." ”

“ Up-river, at a bend below a hillside farmstead some distance from our village, is a broad, deep salmon-pool, fringed with alders and willows. Right across the upper end of this pool stretches a broken ledge of rock, over which, in flood, the waters boom and crash into a seething basin whence thin lines of vapour—blue and grey when the day is dull, or gleaming with the colours of the rainbow when the sun, unclouded, shines aslant the fall—ceaselessly arise, and quiver on the waves of air that catch their movement from the restless swirls beneath. ”

“ The long low building of a water-mill seems to block the way altogether, but in reality it simply utilises the water to turn its wheels, and we shall find the river on the opposite side with its waters banked up some six or eight feet higher, changed in character, looking more still and deep, reflecting the surrounding objects in a still, silent pool, shaded by lofty trees, its banks clothed with deep grass plantains, huge docks and marsh mallows, a spot where, on a sunny day, an irresistible inclination seizes one to lie down on the cool earth. ”

“ Oftentimes within the circle of your sight there is neither house nor man visible. A grey church tower, a windmill, or the dark-brown sail of a wherry in the distance breaks the sense of utter loneliness, but the scene is wild enough to enchain the imagination of many. Long miles of sinuous gleaming river, marshes gay with innumerable flowering plants, wide sheets of water bordered with swaying reeds, yachts or wherries, boats, fish, fowl, and rare birds and plants, and exquisite little bits to paint and sketch—these are the elements out of which a pleasant holiday may be made. ”

“ In this gulf which one might describe as merging from the lake like a thought of love, in this manoir growing out of the bosom of the billows with its dentelated towers, petals bourgeonning from a noble flower, in this encirclement of mountains and these white or rosy peaks which hold them in close embrace, there is something which bids you pause, takes you out of yourself and in order to complete the enchantment compels you to love it. ”

“ Mollie tied the strings of the print sunbonnet under her plump chin and walked with her head a little averted in order to see round the print blinker. Beyond the waving grass-heads the sea appeared, a wide silver glitter. You cannot see the shore from that hill. The sands and the mile-long rollers lie far below that cliff's edge over which the men are let down by ropes to gather the eggs from the awful ledges. ”

“ The lake is good for nothing except sea-fowl, herons, and oysters, and forms such a place as they call in the Indies a lagoon; being shut off from the open Channel by a monstrous great beach or dike of pebbles, of which I shall speak more hereafter. When I was a child I thought that this place was called Moonfleet, because on a still night, whether in summer, or in winter frosts, the moon shone very brightly on the lagoon; but learned afterwards that 'twas but short for 'Mohune-fleet', from the Mohunes, a great family who were once lords of all these parts. ”

“ All is movement and bustle; the mill-stream races away to the river, and the river to the sea. The tree-tops bend and cry; the clouds tell of the gale overhead, now thinning to let the sunshine out, now darkening under a sudden squall and dropping a hurtle of hail.
From the mill-pool to the west opened another vision of meadows with a little grey bridge in the midst of them. ”

“ The upper stream flowed in a straight artificial channel through the garden, still and broad, towards the Priory mill; while just above the Priory wall half the river fell over a high weir, with all its appendages of bucks and hatchways, and eel-baskets, into the Nun’s-pool, and then swept round under the ivied walls, with their fantastic turrets and gables, and little loopholed windows, peering out over the stream, as it hurried down over the shallows to join the race below the mill. ”

“ Just beyond the gap, the line passes Lough Mourne, a melancholy little lake set in a framework of bleak hills, and then runs on across a still bleaker moor; but gradually, as the hills are left behind, the character of the country changes, the houses become more numerous, the fields larger and less stony, one sees an orchard here and there—and then, quite suddenly, the whole landscape becomes prosperous and pastoral, and we caught our first glimpse of wide fields covered with a light and vivid green, which we knew was the green of flax. ”

“ I go back to a gusty afternoon when we rowed our boat the length of the lakes and landed upon the silent shore of the old Doe farm. It was our first visit to the white sand of that beach, to the little footpath leading upward through the orchard, and to the tumble-down cottage with its huge chimney, in which the swifts had found no smoke for twenty long years. ”

“ The Molly was just getting in behind Blackwell's as we left the wharf, and, having four good oars, and the shortest road, we come out into the Gate just ahead on you. My eye! what a place that is to go through in a boat, and on a strong flood! The gentleman, who watched the brig as a cat watches a mouse, says you struck on the Pot, as he called it, but I says 'no,' for the Molly Swash was never know'd to hit rock or shoal in my time aboard her. ”

“ In the great ponds of Marot, and in the lakes of Lomervo—immense liquid plains, deep and surrounded in their whole circumference by a forest of green rushes, water-lilies, flags, and many other aquatic plants, forming a wall of verdure—the enormous quantity of fish of every kind is almost incredible. ”

“ Constant fulness, and crystal clearness, and refreshing coolness of living water, pale green like the jewel that is called aqua marina, flowing over beds of clean sand and bars of polished gravel, and dropping in momentary foam from rocky ledges, between banks that are shaded by groves of fir and ash and poplar, or through dense thickets of alder and willow, or across meadows of smooth verdure sloping up to quaint old-world villages—all these are features of the ideal little river. ”

“ As a small rivulet runs into this lake from the flat ground in its vicinity, and as the soil of this remarkable excavation, however it may have been originally formed, is tenacious, I think we require no such improbable theory to account for its existence. Availing himself of the convenient position of this lake, a farmer in the neighbourhood erected a mill, which gives its name to the lake, on the shore of the Bay of Quinte, and which he supplied with water by making a deep cutting from the lake to the edge of the precipice, from whence it is conveyed in troughs to the mill. ”

“ At the lower end of our village, the valley is joined by a deep ravine through which a sequestered road—hidden by hawthorn hedges, and crossed by numerous water-courses where the hillside streams, dropping from rocks of shale, ripple towards a trout-brook feeding the main river—winds into the quiet country. ”

“ At the bottom of the valley, approached by sunken honeysuckle lanes that seemed winding into the centre of the earth, lay three black ponds, almost hidden in a cul-de-sac of woodland. Though long since appropriated by nature, made her own by moss and rooted oaks, they were so set one below the other, with green causeways between each, that an ancient art, long since become nature, had evidently designed and dug them, years, perhaps centuries, ago. ”

“ The pool in which the river coiled itself under the pine-trees was black and brimming, the fish were rising at the flies that wrought above it, like a spotted net veil in hysterics, the distant hills lay in sleepy undulations of every shade of blue, the grass was warm, and not unduly peopled with ants. ”

“ I shall come here every year, when the castor-oil tree flowers, for it was flowering when first I saw Molly Gregory standing in the doorway of her tent, holding a lantern above her head.... Isn't it still? The night is too close.... Molly, why are you so beautiful? Don't you know the night is in love with you? That's why the fishes are jumping. Don't you know the kangaroo and his mate are stooping to [Pg 154] drink down there, that they may share the same pool with you? Molly, a man and a girl are only young once. ”

“ One day I mounted my mule for a ride to the eastern foothills, and sat down on a little incline and overlooked the valley, a beautiful landscape, while my mule cropped the rich grasses in a circle described by the rope which confined him. I was always a great admirer of nature, and as I sat there alone I could see miles on miles of mammoth mustard waving in the strong breeze which came down over the San Francisco Bay just visible to the northward, and on the mountain summits to the west could see tall timber reaching up into the deep blue of the sky. ”

“ At one village we see a rustic mill, with its water-wheel busily revolving, and the water splashing from its glistening blades. It is the first water-mill we have seen for years. Clear water and foaming rivulets, plashing over black rocks ”

“ A Londoner reading of the crossing of a creek would naturally imagine the scene to be in the immediate neighbourhood of the coast, instead of being perhaps some hundreds of miles in the interior, and would dream of salt water, perriwinkles and sea-weed, when he should be thinking of slimy mud-holes, black snakes and gigantic gum-trees. ”

“ Every bend of the river presents a new landscape, for it is beset by old Moorish mills of the most picturesque forms, each mill having an embattled tower, a memento of the valiant tenure by which those gallant fellows, the Moors, held this earthly paradise, having to be ready at all times for war, and as it were to work with one hand and fight with the other. ”

“ I have examined a small quantity of the dust taken from one of the shells found in the grand mound, with the microscope, and though I am not perfectly certain, yet I believe there are traces of some farinaceous substance to be seen. On skirting the shores of the Lake of the Woods into which Rainy River runs, at the present time, you are struck by the fact that there are no Canadian farmers there, and likewise that there are no mounds to be seen, while along the banks of Rainy River both the agriculturist is found cultivating the soil and the mounds abound. ”