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A thunderstorm unsettles the weather, and here is perhaps another week lost. The farmer dares not discharge his haymakers, because he does not know but that he may require them any day. They are put to turn dung-heaps, clean out the yards, pick up the weeds in the garden, and such like little jobs, over which they can dawdle as much as they like. All the while they are on full pay.
He is taken by a host over-devoted to such joys, to walk among dung-heaps. "After all," he says, "it ought not to offend one's sense. To an honest nose that has preserved its natural innocence, 'tis not a goat, but a bemusked and ambre-scented woman, who smelleth ill."
On their borders, in the very midst of the rubbish and kitchen offal that lay about in heaps, dirty, half-naked children, with straw-colored hair, tumbled over one another, or paddled in the water. In the farm-yards around the dung-heaps, the youngest children of the cottagers kept company with the sow and her grunting pigs.
Sanitary precautions too are very insufficient; practically there are none. Huge unsightly water-holes, filled during the rains with the drainage of all the dung-heaps and mounds of offal and filth that abound in the village, swelter under the hot summer sun. They get covered with a rank green scum, and if their inky depths be stirred, the foulest and most fearful odours issue forth.
The siege lasted eighteen months, and ended when 'all the bread in the city was spent. The pitiful pictures in Lamentations fill in the details of misery, telling how high-born women picked garbage from dung-heaps, and mothers made a ghastly meal of their infants, while the nobles were wasted to skeletons, and the little children piteously cried for bread.
And farther on there were low-lying, swampy fields, and between them and the roadside a few miserable poplars with cabins sunk below the dung-heaps, and the meagre potato-plots lying about them; and then, as these are passed, there are green enclosures full of fattening kine, and here and there a dismantled cottage, one wall still black with the chimney's smoke, uttering to those who know the country a tale of eviction.
All was fish that came to Tam's net: tadpoles, newts, and stickleback from the ponds, beetles from the dung-heaps, green crabs from the sea- shore nay, even in time such larger prizes as hedgehogs, moles, and nestfuls of birds. Nothing delighted him so much as to be out in the fields, hunting for and taming these his natural pets.
Banishment, death, the ergastulum, torture and, what is much worse, the insults the brute heaps on any one he turns against I am too wise to give that " he spat on the flag-stones "for the friendship of Commodus. And Commodus is Rome; you can't persuade me he isn't. Rome turns on its favorites as he does scorns them, insults them, throws them on dung-heaps. That for Rome!" He spat again.
Thus, not irrigating nor burning dung for fuel, their wealth increases of itself. They build their houses from ancient times round about mountainous dung-heaps, upon which they throw all things in season. It is a possession from father to son, and increase comes forth. Owing to the number of Army horses in certain places there arises very much horse-dung.
It comes through a line of ingenious, quickwitted, up-to-everything communicators, and is made known proximately to the fortunate possessor by a diplomatic potman, who waits in a room frequented by a groom, who pumped it out of a stable-boy, who It is not improbable that the information has somewhat deteriorated in its journeyings through mews and along dung-heaps: it is possible, when it comes to be made use of, it may be found very expensive in its application.
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