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A Brook, coming down from the Spessart Mountains, falls into the Mayn there; having formed for itself, there and upwards, a considerable dell or hollow way; chiefly on the western or right bank of which stands the Village with its barnyards and piggeries: on both sides of the great High-road, which here crosses the Brook, and will lead you to Hanau twenty miles off, or back to Aschaffenburg, and even to Nurnberg and the Donau Countries, if you persevere.

Water from shallow wells within a hundred feet of barnyards, pigpens, or other outhouses is usually unsafe to drink. At Newport, Rhode Island, more than eighty persons were made sick with the fever by drinking the water from a well only ten feet deep. The impure water from one spring at Trenton, New Jersey, gave the fever to nearly a hundred persons in one season.

The rail trains crowded with children coming home. The poultry, fed as never since they were born, stand wondering at the farmer's generosity. The markets are full of massacred barnyards. The great table will be spread and crowded with two, or three, or four generations.

Fancy an animal with the murderous ferocity of a mink, the agility of a squirrel, the penetration of a ferret and the cunning of a rat, infesting the thickets and barnyards of this country. The mongoose can live wherever a rat can live, provided it can get a fair amount of animal food.

The ice on the trees and the pastures had locked and sealed their larders. Their little beaks could not pierce it for seeds and grubs, and so they were forced to repair to kitchen doors and barnyards in quest of stray crumbs from the provender of men and cattle.

Dogs, cats, cockatoes swinging on their perches, peacocks, parrots, pelicans, and every one of the cocks swarmed from the barnyards and garden and cellars, to add their shrill cries and shrieks to the universal babel.

Consequently the barnyards packed to the limit and running over with "The garnered largess of the fruitful year" not only mean feed for all the variegated animals that are used in Manchurian agriculture, but fuel for the long Manchurian winters as well. I even find the peasants digging up the roots and stubble to be dried and burned in the houses.

Far and near the land was dotted with slowly-moving cattle, nipping gratefully at the succulent grass tips, their formerly lank and rough-haired flanks distended with the young year's generous bounty. In the barnyards was a scurrying of yellow balls of down as the clucking hens told of some juicy tidbit wriggling for their delectation.

Also, in barnyards we saw fowls, which was more than we had seen West of us and now and again a family cat dozing on some doorstep freshly swept. "I had forgotten there was such calm and peace in the world," said Boyd. "And the women look not unkindly on us do you think, Loskiel?"

Then putting the birch horn to his mouth he cooed out such a tender moo- oo-o-o that the boys were fairly startled by the similarity of its sound to the familiar notes in the barnyards at home; but soon other things excited them, for hardly had the echoes of Big Tom's mooings died away before there came rushing out from the forest the two moose calves.