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Like men in the unearthly realities of a dream they moved through their routine duties, waiting for the orders that would bring that well-known, sickening, savage tightening of their courage and send them, laden like beasts of burden, up once more to that hell of blood and mud, of nerve-shattering shell, of blinding glare and ear-bursting roar of gun fire, and, worse than all, to the place where, crouching in the farcical deceptive shelter of the sandbagged trench, their fingers gripping into the steel of their rifle hands, they would wait for the zero hour.
And the while he bent down and kissed the smiling upturned face, and permitted one hand to wander caressingly over the girl's wealth of beautiful hair. A fierce wind swept down off the hills. So it had blown all night and all the day before. The sky was overcast, and the thermometer had dropped below zero.
A further run of twenty miles found them beneath a cloudless sky, with the wind, soft and balmy, fallen to the gentlest of zephyrs, and the temperature risen to the extraordinary height of forty-five degrees above zero.
Indeed, some people in our vicinity actually burst out laughing. "To think that that accursed zero should have turned up NOW!" she sobbed. "The accursed, accursed thing! And, it is all YOUR fault," she added, rounding upon me in a frenzy. "It was you who persuaded me to cease staking upon it." "But, Madame, I only explained the game to you.
Some of the men thought we ought to be vindictive and take every opportunity to put a crimp in the business for the owners. I knew what their profits averaged. By calling fussy little strikes often enough I could have kept the profits close to the zero mark. Thus the men would be making wages out of the business and the owners would be making nothing.
Seeing that they were entirely cut off and without any hope of assistance, they immediately concluded that their only escape from death was to run for their lives, and get back into the hills, if possible, believing that on account of the steep and rugged trail the savages could not pursue them. It was fearfully cold, the thermometer ranging about twenty-five degrees below zero.
This led the major to ask other questions concerning the trade of the Baltic. "I will tell you nothing about it, if I stand here till I die, and you may go to ." This brought the sympathy of the colored people, as well as of the rest of us, down below zero. Said one colored man, "Let him stand there, then, until he dies."
And first, as regards society: Prometheus, emerging from the womb of Nature, awakens to life in a state of inertia which is very charming, but which would soon become misery and torture if he did not make haste to abandon it for labor. In this original idleness, the product of Prometheus being nothing, his well-being is the same as that of the brute, and may be represented by zero.
Perhaps it is not generally known that the persimmon, so well remembered by old campaigners in Virginia, will grow readily in this latitude. There are forests of this tree around Paterson, N. J., and it has been known to endure twenty- seven degrees below zero. It is a handsome tree at any season, and its fruit in November caused much straggling from our line of march in the South.
I'll write you a line while I am away. It was all very well to say 'Cheer up, but my spirits had gradually sunk at each boy's departure, until they were far below zero when I found myself alone. I wandered aimlessly about the playground, which had never before appeared so deserted or silent, kicking stones about with my feet, and making holes in the ground with the heels of my boots.
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