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To be kept up all night and run about like a "yellow breeches," to have my ears crammed with promises and my skin drenched with the mists, to find myself stranded in Barnet at the end. It was more than any man's temper could stand, and that I told the sergeant.
In some poor outcasts; stranded by the wayside, she had recognized a family of honest weavers from Bazeilles, father, mother, and three little girls, of whom the largest was only nine years old. They were utterly disheartened and forlorn, and so weary and footsore that they could go no further, and had thrown themselves down at the foot of a wall.
The latter were readily accounted for by the theory that they must be the remains of the Carthaginian elephants brought over by the armies of Hannibal, while it was suggested that the others might have been swept from India by some great flood, and stranded where they were found.
At dinner, after receiving your order, the waiter would disappear for half an hour, and then bring your entire meal on one tray, the over-cooked meats stranded in lakes of coagulated gravy, the entrees cold and the ices warm. He had generally forgotten two or three essentials, but to send back for them meant to wait another half-hour, as his other clients were clamoring to be served.
But I could not get any comfort into me out of the reflection that we had stranded on English instead of African or South American mud; down on deck, now crouching close beside the boy without, however, offering to touch the motionless figure, was a massive savage beast, apparently a man-eater; and it was all the same to me whether it had sprung aboard off the banks of an Indian river, or trotted across this breast of English slime out of a showman's cage.
Depend on't some of the provisions have been stranded among the rocks, and, as they will be smashed to pieces before long, the sooner we go about it the better. The truth is, that while you have been wastin' your time running about the island, Master Burns and I have been doin' this, an' we've saved some things already among them a barrel of pork.
He himself had set out into this incomprehensible world, and here he was, stranded in this little town, where there was never a crumb to feed a hungry imagination; nothing but a teeming confusion of petty cares.
I am reminded that the first performance I ever saw in my life had one of the most grotesque interruptions imaginable. At a sort of country hotel much frequented by driving parties and sleighing parties, a company of players were "strapped," to use the theatrical term, stranded, unable either to pay their bills or to move on.
"Friends," I said, "behold me and my friends and this our boat cast upon the reef like a stranded porpoise. Wilt help us float again, so that we may get to the king's town to-night and sleep in peace? And I shall pay every man twenty sticks of rich, sweet tobacco and four bottles of grog between thee."
In a moment the line was re-organised, but the surprised tiger, finding itself surrounded by foes, turned tail and ran down the bank of the river. The stream was nearly dry and the bed was very shingly, and as the startled tiger picked its way gingerly across the pebbles and pools of water it looked like a stranded cat.
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