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But we want the ploughed fields beyond, the real woods with stacked-up timber, German fashion; the orchards and the kitchen gardens; the tracks across the high-lying sheep downs; the towing-paths where the barges come up the rivers; the deep lanes where the hay-carts have left long wisps on the overhanging elms; the high-roads running from village to village, with the hooded carts and bicycles and even the solemn Juggernaut traction-engines upon them.
He himself had drawn a light buggy and thought it good fun, though you did have to keep your heels down and trot instead of canter. He had liked best to lope off with the boy on his back, down to the Corners, where the store was. But here there were no ploughs, nor hay-carts, nor mowing-machines.
They were the ordinary hay-carts of the country, to be encountered at any time on the more frequented road nearer to the hills, carrying produce to the city. The carts were going towards the city now, but they were empty. Fifty yards in front of the caravan a man splashed along through the standing water, his head bent to the rain. It was Kosmaroff.
I assure you, on my word of honour," he said, turning to the group around them, "we didn't even mention Kenrick's name. We were merely talking about a certain dishonest parson who rode in hay-carts, when the fellow sprang on Jones like a tiger-cat.
"In a huff," admitted Philip and dismissed the dangerous topic with a philosophic shrug. "I won't have you trailing after me on a hay-wagon!" exclaimed Diane in honest indignation. "Hum! Just how," begged Philip, "does one go about effecting a national ordinance to keep hay-carts off the highway?"
Then off again before sunrise in the cool amid the shouting and confusion of a breaking camp, with truant ponies to be hunted, and everybody yelling for his right of road, and the elephants sauntering urbanely through it all with trunks alert for pickings from the hay-carts. They were nights and days superbly gorgeous, all-entertaining, affluent of humor.
Upon this was a quaint conglomeration: omnibuses, hackney coaches, corricolos, the army service waggons, huge hay-carts drawn by bullocks, squads of Chasseurs d'Afrique, droves of microscopic asses, trucks of Alsatian emigrants, spahis in scarlet cloaks all filed by in a whirlwind cloud of dust, amidst shouts, songs, and trumpetcalls, between two rows of vile-looking booths, at the doors of which lanky Mahonnais women might be seen doing their hair, drinking-dens filled with soldiers, and shops of butchers and knackers.
Here were no longer the blasé beasts of a sophisticated world. Animals of this region had never seen a town larger than Amersfoort. A motor-car was to them as horrifying an object as a lion escaping from his cage at a circus. Horses reared, hay-carts swayed, peasants shrieked maledictions or shook fists; but always, crawling at snail's pace, we managed to scrape past without accident.
Perhaps it was a Puritan scrupulousness in my blood that had made me take the stand that four-wheeled vehicles, such as wagons, hay-carts and the like, being slow-moving, were permissible, but that buggies, or any form of rapid two-wheeled vehicle, were not. To this Colin had retorted that, on that basis, a tally-ho would be all right, or even an automobile.
The rustic gathering of Lower-Canadian habitants who are crowding it with their native ponies and hay-carts and their stuff-coated, deliberate persons, is beginning to break apart as the steamer swings heavily away.
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