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It must have transported itself to Ludlow for the season in rumbling coaches and heavyish curricles and there entertained itself in decent emulation of that metropolis which a choice of railway-lines had not as yet placed within its immediate reach. It had balls at the assembly-rooms; it had Mrs. Siddons to play; it had Catalani to sing.

In some curious way their repetition lends to the stark road a certain grace. When Zilda Chaplot was young there were fewer wires on these telegraph poles, fewer railway-lines opposite the station, fewer houses in St. Armand, which lies half a mile away. The hotel itself is the same, but in those days it was not painted yellow, as it is now, and was not half so well kept.

Among the better class of people, resident in the cities and large towns, I found a fair degree of liberality of sentiment and courtesy of speech; but in travelling off the main railway-lines, and among the average of the population, any man of Northern opinions must use much circumspection of language; while, in many counties of South Carolina and Georgia, the life of an avowed Northern radical would hardly be worth a straw but for the presence of the military.

The throne of his heart was empty, and there was none to fill it. Julie? The sea-wall ended not far from Donovan's camp of mud and cinders, and having got there, Peter thought he would go on and get a cup of tea. He crossed the railway-lines, steered through a great American rest camp, crossed the canal, and entered the camp.

The capital value of Alsace-Lorraine is put roughly at a thousand millions, and the Germans leave behind them considerable additions to the wealth of the province in the shape of new railway-lines and canals, fine stations, and public buildings, not to speak of the thousands of fruit-trees with which, in German fashion, they have lined the roads a small, unintentional reparation for the murdered fruit-trees of the North.

Yet to the left, over the housetops of foul black streets running upwards from the railway-lines, there shone the great silver plain, and afar off a channel set with white sailing-ships and steamers, and dark majestic hills. But because of the quality of the place, and perhaps of her guide, she did not want to recognise its beauty.

There was something inexorable in the poverty of the scene, shameful in the meanness of its details, which gave a collective impression of boards and tin and frozen earth, sheds and rotting piles, railway-lines striding flat across a thoroughfare of puddles, and tracks of the humbler, the universal horse-car, traversing obliquely this path of danger; loose fences, vacant lots, mounds of refuse, yards bestrewn with iron pipes, telegraph poles, and bare wooden backs of places.

As for knowing what was passing in the world, one might as well have been in another planet. We saw no papers, and there was not much prospect of obtaining any. Before the war we had all talked lightly of wires being cut and railway-lines pulled up, but, in truth, I do not think anyone realized what these two calamities really meant.

Of the five railway-lines meeting at Le Mans only two were available, that running to Rennes via Laval, and that running to Angers. I find from a report drawn up by M. Piquet a little later, that he managed to send off twenty-five trains, some of them drawn by two and three engines.

Reserves and their complement, artillery, railway-lines, roads, and bridges, if any, over streams and railways must be noted in short he must obtain an eye photograph of the country he observes and grasp exactly what is happening there.