None of these were
clothed to any extent worth mentioning, each appearing
to have hit in the matter of raiment the decent mean
between a high and low caste Hindoo. An angularity
of lineament, and a fixity of facial machinery in general,
proclaimed that serious work was the order of the day.
They sheared in the great barn, called for the nonce
the Shearing-barn, which on ground-plan resembled a
church with transepts. It not only emulated the form
of the neighbouring church of the parish, but vied with
it in antiquity. Whether the barn had ever formed one
of a group of conventual buildings nobody seemed to be
aware; no trace of such surroundings remained. The
vast porches at the sides, lofty enough to admit a waggon
laden to its highest with corn in the sheaf, were spanned
by heavy-pointed arches of stone, broadly and boldly cut,
whose very simplicity was the origin of a grandeur not
apparent in erections where more ornament has been
attempted. The dusky, filmed, chestnut roof, braced
and tied in by huge collars, curves, and diagonals, was
far nobler in design, because more wealthy in material,
than nine-tenths of those in our modern churches.
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