United States or Martinique ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Other houses were made neat and pretty with paint, and green window-blinds, and door-yard fences, as time went on. Primitive fashions and modes of life which had done for the early days of the settlement, gave place by degrees to the more artificial requirements of village society.
Williams himself walked ahead with two dishevelled and frightened coureurs du bois, twoscore at least of the townspeople of Vincennes, friends and relatives of the prisoners, pressing about and crying out to Williams to have mercy on them. As for Williams, he took them in to the Colonel, the townspeople pressing into the door-yard and banking in front of it on the street.
"Oh, what heaps and heaps of fireflies!" exclaimed Betty, as she unhooked my cage to move me into the house that evening. "It looks as if our door-yard was full of moving lanterns." "Nothin' but lightnen bugs!" said Joe contemptuously. "Here, see me catch 'em," and in a few minutes he showed her a handful which he had killed by crushing between his hands.
"Wild auk, you mean," said Professor Farrago, shaking hands with me. "You will start to-night, won't you?" "Yes, but Heaven knows how I'm ever going to land in this man Halyard's door-yard. Good-bye!" "About that sea-biped " began Professor Farrago, shyly. "Oh, don't!"
There wasn't any one any nearer than father, in the West, or mother in Bermuda, who really cared a rap whether I sat on that parapet all night or not, or who would be sorry if I leaped to the dirty bricks of the next door-yard not that I meant to, of course.
The door-yard was muddy and littered; here the razor-back hogs rooted unrebuked; the rail fence had fallen on one side, and it would seem that only their attachment to home prevented them from wandering forth to be lost in the wilderness; the clap-boards of the shiny roof were oozing and steaming with dampness, and showed all awry and uneven; the clay and stick chimney, hopelessly ont of plumb, leaned far from the wall.
Barbara, in black, was shopping for Fannie. Johanna was at her side. The day was brisk. Ox-wagons from Clearwater, mule-teams from Blackland, bull-carts from Sandstone, were everywhere. Cotton bales were being tumbled, torn, sampled, and weighed; products of the truck-patch and door-yard, and spoils of the forest, were changing hands.
Now and then we came to a house, but so dead and forbidding was its aspect that we did not dare even to ask our way. Never a soul appeared in the door-yard, and if smoke came from the chimney it was a thin, blue wisp as from dying embers. The land was asleep, under the spell of the white touch.
This open ground looked hardly larger than an ordinary door-yard, but was really several acres in extent. Its green was more vivid than that of the inclosing forest. Away beyond it rose a line of giant cliffs similar to those upon which we are supposed to stand in our survey of the savage scene, and through which the road had somehow made its climb to the summit.
We had brought with us uncooked rations, and while two of the soldiers went into the house for cooking utensils, the rest of the party, including the Indians, were leaning in a line upon the door-yard fence; Sill and Lamson were at the end of the line, where the fence cornered with a hedge.
Word Of The Day