eager looks that indicate the
earnestness with which those who live in monotonous ease at home look out
for amusement abroad. Yet the physiognomy of the people, when more
closely examined, was far from exhibiting the indifference of stupidity;
their features were rough, but remarkably intelligent; grave, but the
very reverse of stupid; and from among the young women an artist might
have chosen more than one model whose features and form resembled those
of Minerva. The children also, whose skins were burnt black, and whose
hair was bleached white, by the influence of the sun, had a look and
manner of life and interest. It seemed, upon the whole, as if poverty,
and indolence, its too frequent companion, were combining to depress the
natural genius and acquired information of a hardy, intelligent, and
reflecting peasantry.

Some such thoughts crossed Waverley's mind as he paced his horse slowly
through the rugged and flinty street of Tully-Veolan, interrupted only in
his meditations by the occasional caprioles which his charger exhibited
at the reiterated assaults of those canine Cossacks, the collies before
mentioned. The village was more than half a mile long, the cottages being
irregularly divided from each other by gardens, or yards, as the
inhabitants called them, of different sizes, where (for it is Sixty Years
Since) the now universal potato was unknown, but which were stored with
gigantic plants of kale or colewort, encircled with groves of nettles,
and exhibited here and there a huge hemlock, or the national thistle,
overshadowing a quarter of the petty inclosure. The broken ground on
which the village was built had never been levelled; so that these
inclosures presented declivities of every degree, here rising like
terraces, there sinking like tan-pits. The dry-stone walls which fenced,
or seemed to fence (for they were sorely breached), these hanging gardens
of Tully-Veolan were intersected by a narrow lane leading to the common
field, where the joint labour of the villagers cultivated alternate
ridges and patches of rye, oats, barley, and pease, each of such minute
extent that at a little distance the unprofitable variety of the surface
resembled a tailor's book of patterns. In a few favoured instances, there
appeared behind the cottages a miserable wigwam, compiled of earth, loose
stones, and turf, where the wealthy might perhaps shelter a starved cow
or sorely galled horse. But almost every hut was fenced in f