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.
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