And so we started, and everybody gave us a goodbye
and waved their handkerchiefs or helmets. And
everybody we met, going down the hill and through
the village was respectful to us, except some shabby
little boys on the outskirts. They said:
“Oh, what a guy!” And hove clods at us.
In my experience boys are the same in all ages.
They don’t respect anything, they don’t
care for anything or anybody. They say “Go
up, baldhead” to the prophet going his unoffending
way in the gray of antiquity; they sass me in the
holy gloom of the Middle Ages; and I had seen them
act the same way in Buchanan’s administration;
I remember, because I was there and helped. The
prophet had his bears and settled with his boys; and
I wanted to get down and settle with mine, but it
wouldn’t answer, because I couldn’t have
got up again. I hate a country without a derrick.
SLOW TORTURE
Straight off, we were in the country. It was
most lovely and pleasant in those sylvan solitudes
in the early cool morning in the first freshness of
autumn. From hilltops we saw fair green valleys
lying spread out below, with streams winding through
them, and island groves of trees here and there, and
huge lonely oaks scattered about and casting black
blots of shade; and beyond the valleys we saw the
ranges of hills, blue with haze, stretching away in
billowy perspective to the horizon, with at wide intervals
a dim fleck of white or gray on a wave-summit, which
we knew was a castle. We crossed broad natural
lawns sparkling with dew, and we moved like spirits,
the cushioned turf giving out no sound of footfall;
we dreamed along through glades in a mist of green
light that got its tint from the sun-drenched roof
of leaves overhead, and by our feet the clearest and
coldest of runlets went frisking and gossiping over
its reefs and making a sort of whispering music, comfortable
to hear; and at times we left the world behind and
entered into the solemn great deeps and rich gloom
of the forest, where furtive wild things whisked and
scurried by and were gone before you could even get
your eye on the place where the noise was; and where
only the earliest birds were turning out and getting
to business with a song here and a quarrel yonder
and a mysterious far-off hammering and drumming for
worms on a tree trunk away somewhere in the impenetrable
remotenesses of the woods. And by and by out
we would swing again into the glare.
About the third or fourth or fifth time that we swung
out into the glare—it was along there somewhere,
a couple of hours or so after sun-up—it
wasn’t as pleasant as it had been. It was
beginning to get hot. This was quite noticeable.
We had a very long pull, after that, without any
shade. Now it is curious how progressively little
frets grow and multiply after they once get a start.
Things which I didn’t mind at all, at first,
