text:  It was about the hour of vespers; and an unusually dense crowd of the town's people of Hammelburg of all ages ranks and sexes swarmed in the small open space before the fine old Gothic church of the town and stood in many a checkered group--here of fat thriving _bourgeois_ and their portly wives dragging in their hands chubby and rebellious little urchins who looked all but spherical in their monstrous puffed hose or short wadded multifold petticoats the miniature reproductions of the paternal and maternal monstrosities of attire--there of more noisy and clamorous artizans in humbler and less preposterous dress--on the one side of chattering serving-damsels almost crushed under their high pyramidical black caps worn in imitation of an ancient fashion of their betters--on the other of grave counsellors and _schreibers_ in their black costumes interlarding their pompous phrases with most canine Latin--here again of the plumed and checkered soldiers of the civic guard--there of ragged-robed beggars whose whine had become a second nature--all in a constant ferment of movement and noise until the square might be fancied to look like the living and crawling mass of an old worm-eaten cheese