4. A boy with a swollen jaw in the dentist's chair. A group of smaller children to whom the boy proudly holds up a tooth.
5. A hen calling wildly to her chickens and trying to cover them with her wings, and a farmer running up with a gun. The farmer has his gun in one hand, and with the other holds up a big hen-hawk for a group of people to see.
6. A street with everybody running in one direction, pointing ahead. A house on fire with firemen climbing up on ladders.
7. A family assembled at the dinner table in the evening quietly talking together. A man taps on the window pane outside; every one starts up in surprise and great pleasure, as if he were a relative returned from travels.
8. A group of women gathered at the end of a pier on a stormy night, straining their eyes anxiously out to sea. A fisherman returning up the beach, at early dawn, with a net full of fish on his back. In the background a small house with children running out to meet him.
=72. Travel.=--It is hard to draw a definite line between descriptive writing and narrative writing, since description is very often needed to make a narration interesting, and sometimes to make it complete. There is one kind of composition where the two methods of writing are needed in almost equal quantities, and that is in stories of travel. In writing an account of a journey, you have a distinct story to tell, since you are narrating a series of events that took place one after the other; but without description of what you saw the account is scarcely worth writing at all. Your aim is to give your reader a clear idea of the course of your journey, and you can only do this by a combination of narration and description, by telling what happened and then by trying to make a picture of the event. So that there are two main things to remember in writing of travel: first, to make your journey clear and intelligible by following the time-order in your narration, and by recollecting all the important stages of the trip; and, second, to select for description the most interesting incidents or places which you saw, and to write of them as vividly and picturesquely as possible.
The roads were gay early next morning when we started, for it was market day, and the country people were flocking into town, some driving their pigs, some riding donkeys with calfskin saddles adorned with little red tassels; the women wearing high-crowned hats with bright handkerchiefs tied on underneath, and bright cotton shawls; the men with brown-and-white-striped blankets gracefully thrown over the shoulder, and in their hands long, brass-tipped staves. Most of the women had large gold earrings, and some of them, in addition, gold chains and crosses and filigree heart-shaped pendants. We met presently a troop of fishwomen running at full speed to catch the market, their baskets balanced on their heads. Their earrings were hoop-shaped, and their skirts short and tucked up, and they had embroidered purses hanging at the side. The fishermen we overtook a little later, going back toward the sea with their nets. All had time to touch their caps and say "Good day," for civility to strangers is the rule in Portugal. Here and there were children minding goats under the shade of the olives. No idlers, no beggars were to be seen. At noon we came to Alcobaça, and walked through the town to the great abbey church of the Cistercians. The market was going on outside it. Gayly dressed women presided over heaps of maize and oranges and eggs. Strings of donkeys were tied up by the wall. A scarlet-robed acolyte walked amongst the people collecting alms. A broad flight of steps led up to the great door. Inside all is very simple and grand--a vaulted roof, rows of slender columns, no pictures or tawdry decorations to be seen. Now and then, not very often, a woman would come in from the busy market place and kneel to say a silent prayer.... We visited the convent where Beckford had lived, and saw its great tiled kitchen and its beautiful cloisters, and then went back to the inn to lunch, where we enjoyed above all a liberal dish of green peas--green still in our memories.