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Like the old Calais watch-tower, it was caked round by, and embedded in, old houses, and had its four curious gargoyles still doing work. On this 'grand' place I noticed an old house bearing date '1625, and some wonderful feats in the way of red-tiled roofing, of which there were enormous stretches, all narrow, sinuous, and suggesting Nuremberg.
Then, to steel himself against pity, he let his mind go back over the events of the previous night. He thought of the scene in the MacClures' cottage, of the heart-broken woman, of her husband riding with the brutal troopers to a trial without justice and a death without pity. He felt with his hand the blood caked on his own cheek, the scab on the cut where the yeoman had struck him.
Immediately after the American occupation some five hundred barrels of caked excrement were taken from a single tower in one of the old Manila monasteries. The moat around the city wall, and the esteros, or tidal creeks, reeked with filth, and the smells which assailed one's nostrils, especially, at night, were disgusting. Distilled water was not to be had for drinking purposes.
There were white-tusked wild males, with fallen leaves and nuts and twigs lying in the wrinkles of their necks and the folds of their ears; fat, slow-footed she-elephants, with restless, little pinky black calves only three or four feet high running under their stomachs; young elephants with their tusks just beginning to show, and very proud of them; lanky, scraggy old-maid elephants, with their hollow anxious faces, and trunks like rough bark; savage old bull elephants, scarred from shoulder to flank with great weals and cuts of bygone fights, and the caked dirt of their solitary mud baths dropping from their shoulders; and there was one with a broken tusk and the marks of the full-stroke, the terrible drawing scrape, of a tiger's claws on his side.
At last a cold little shudder quivered along down the widow's meager frame and she said in a weak voice: "Ugh, it was awful just the mere look of that phillipene!" Rowena did not answer. Her faculties were still caked; she had not yet found her voice. Presently the widow said, a little resentfully: "Always been used to sleeping together in-fact, prefer it.
Whatever agency is at work in that neighborhood, and it is popularly supposed to be the devil, it changes means and direction without time or season. It creeps up whole hillsides with insidious heat, unguessed until one notes the pine woods dying at the top, and having scorched out a good block of timber returns to steam and spout in caked, forgotten crevices of years before.
There, pass me the stuff on yonder platter that looks like caked mud from an anchor fluke, and swells like breath of paradise, and let me question you;" and while I sat and drank with that yellow servitor sitting in front of me, I plied her with questions, just as a baby might who had come into the world with a full-blown gift of speech.
He was early to his work, and by 6 a.m. a bright fire was burning up, lamps were lighted, the bell rung, and soon the occupants of the dormitories began to make their appearance, shivering, and so indeed was I for it was a cold morning, twenty degrees below Zero, or thereabouts: the smoke seemed to freeze in the chimney, the window panes were caked with ice, and nearly everything in the house frozen solid.
You may have seen a sown field in spring immediately after a great rain-fall; and you may have observed that a large portion of it, on its lower side, was smooth, and run together and caked, bearing all the marks of having been for some days under water. On the higher portions the wheat was springing, but on this portion, sown at the same time, the ground was bare.
There are fifty more perhaps a hundred of them." There were indeed considerably more of the Brandenburgers to be seen when the dust from that shattered wall had subsided. They came streaming in to the darkened hall, dishevelled, their Pickelhaubes gone in many cases, their rifles missing, their grey clothing now a mass of caked mud, and their hands and faces of the same colour.
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