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As the girl passed through the stenching, many-hued bazaar, the roar would cease for a second and then rise again. Turbaned and pugreed Mohammedan and Hindoo men of all grades of color, language, and belief, but with only one theory on women, would stare first at the pony that she rode, then at her, and then at the ancient grandmother who trotted in her wake.

"Imagine a dense and poisonous jungle, carpeted by rotten vegetation in which one's feet sank deeply and from which arose a visible and stenching vapour. Imagine living things, slimy things, moving beneath the tread, sometimes coiling about our riding boots, sometimes making hissing sounds.

That was the spirit of sahibdom that is not always quite commendable; it is the spirit that takes Anglo-Saxon women to the seething, stenching plains and holds them there high-chinned to stiffen their men-folk by courageous example, but it leads, too, to things not quite so womanly and good.

In the third winter of a world-madness, with Europe guzzling blood and wild with the taste of it, America grew flatulent, stenching winds from the battle-field blowing her prosperity. Granaries filled to bursting tripled in value, and, in congested districts, men with lean faces rioted when bread advanced a cent a loaf.

The hair, of which the women have no very great abundance, is very simply made up, plastered down flat with some sort of stenching oil, parted in the middle, and tied into a knot at the back of the head, pretty much in the same way as clergymen's wives ordinarily wear it. A heavy-looking silver or metal pin, or sometimes two, may also be found inserted in this knot as an ornament.

Swiftly along the dark road sped the dispatch-rider who had come from the far-off blue hills of Alsace across the war-scorched area of northern France into the din and fire and stenching suffocation and red-running streams of Picardy for service as required. Past St. Prey he rushed; past Thiueloy, and into Mortemer, and on to the hilly region where the Eualine flows between its hilly banks.

There was the same attraction about this freelance warfare which there might have been about a privateer in contrast with a flotilla of modern dreadnaughts and frantic chasers, and it reminded him of Daniel Boone, and Kit Carson, and Davy Crockett, and other redoubtable scouts of old who did not depend on stenching suffocation and the poisoning of streams.

Their perfume, hanging in the heavy night air, lay on the village, making one forget the over-curtain of stenching mist. Down by the shore of the Nares Sea, this world of the depths had seemed darkly sinister. But in the village now, I felt it less ominous.

I know that some have understood this of wild elder, that grows so far from towns or villages that the crowing of cocks cannot reach near it; and doubtless that sort ought to be preferred to the stenching common elder that grows about decayed and ruined places; but others have understood this in a higher sense, not literal, but allegorical, according to the method of the Pythagoreans, as when it was said that Mercury's statue could not be made of every sort of wood; to which sentence they gave this sense, that God is not to be worshipped in a vulgar form, but in a chosen and religious manner.

Swiftly and silently along the moonlit road he sped, the dispatch-rider who had come from the blue hills of Alsace across the war-scorched area into the din and fire and stenching suffocation and red-running streams of Picardy "for service as required."