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Five or ten miles per day is as great a distance as animals can travel; and even at that rate it is quite common for the oxen to give out, and be left by the roadside, a prey for dogs and other wild animals.
During the excitement, it fortunately never occurred to the mild-eyed oxen to make a bolt with the sledge; on the contrary, they stood still in their tracks the whole time, gazing with placid indifference straight before them.
"We can all go up together. You and Josey can be loading the horse-sled, while I load the ox-sled, and then we can drive them down, and so get two loads down, instead of one." "Well," said Oliver, "I mean to ask my father." "Or perhaps," continued Jonas, "you can be teamster for the oxen, and Josey can drive the horse, and so I remain up in the woods, cutting and splitting."
We left Perugia at about three o'clock to-day, and went down a pretty steep descent; but I have no particular recollection of the road till it again began to descend, before reaching the village of Magione. We all, except my wife, walked up the long hill, while the vettura was dragged after us with the aid of a yoke of oxen.
They had their beautiful names written up over their doors, and were for the service of the lady visitors only; there were other machines for gentlemen, and no doubt it was their owners whom we saw gathering the fat seaweed thrown up by the storm into the carts drawn by oxen over the sand.
Knowing that if the cattle should take fright and run, it would be better that they leave the wagons, I dropped the wagon-tongue to which I was hitching a team, and called to a boy who was hooking up the next wagon, telling him not to do so. He had, however, already attached to that wagon the team consisting of three yoke of oxen.
These things had fretted the calm of that clear judgment that had once baffled five navies. Therefore he cursed the oxen and ordered them rum, and Smerdrak had said "Aye, aye, sir," and gone below. Towards sunset Shard was standing on the poop, thinking of death; it would not come to him by thirst; mutiny first, he thought.
The great merchants owned ships and many of them, such as John Hancock of Boston, and Stephen Girard of Philadelphia, had grown very rich. Inland transportation depended on horses and oxen or boats. There were few good roads, sometimes none at all save bridle paths and trails. The settlers along the river valleys used boats almost entirely.
One unpleasant sight here is the skeletons of horses and oxen along the roadside; or at times a fresh carcase surrounded by a convocation of huge serious-looking carrion crows, with neat white neck-cloths. The skeletons look like wrecks, and make you feel very lonely on the wide veld.
The sad-looking mother, with three or four children in ragged clothes, was sitting inside; the father and the eldest boy were walking beside the oxen. Their apparent misery was depressing, added to which the day, which all along had been cold and dismal, now began to close in, and, what was worse, rain began to fall, which soon grew to be a regular downpour.
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