A Typical Representative

“Oh, dear!”—Linda, with a happy expression on her face, looked out the window. “Just look how lovely it is!”
“The ‘loveliness’” was a small country fellow by the roadside holding—by the reins—a dappled mare with dirty flanks, yoked to a battered cart. The villager’s padded jacket was shedding clumps of hair, boots sat crookedly on unevenly cut tops, and the little cords of the earflap cap drooped sadly along hollow cheeks. And all this gear— in a thirty-degree summer heat!