--In one of these plates, an
itinerant male fortune-teller is satisfying a young peasant as to the
probability of her speedy marriage, by means of a pack of cards, from
which he has turned up the king and queen and ace of hearts. In the
other, _a cunning woman_ is solving a question by a book and key. The
poor girl's sweetheart is an absent soldier, and fears and doubts are
naturally entertained for his safety. To unlock the mysteries of fate,
the key is attached to the mass-book, and suspended from the tip of the
finger of the sybil, who reads the first chapter of the gospel of St.
John; and the invocation is answered by the key turning of _its own
accord_, when she arrives at the verse beginning, "and the word was made
flesh[101]."--A fine rose-window in the church of the abbey of Bonport,
and two specimens of painted glass from its windows, the one
representing angels holding musical instruments, supposed to be of the
thirteenth century, the other containing a set of male and female heads
of extraordinarily rich color, probably executed about a century later,
are given by _Willemin_ in his very beautiful _Monumens Francais
inedits_. In the same work, you will likewise find two still more
interesting painted windows from Pont-de-l'Arche; some boatmen and their
wives in the Norman costume of the end of the sixteenth century, and a
citizen of the town with his lady, praying before a fald-stool, bearing
the date, 1621.
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