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But, as far as the soldier boys could see, there was no sign of life. Even the birds seemed to have flown away. There were no chickens, no dogs, no cattle nor horses in fact none of the usual farm scenes. Here and there were farmhouses, some in ruins, others scarcely touched by the devastating wave of war.
"The people who first made a home had their initials cut over the door. Many of the Jersey farmhouses have several sets of initials on the door-stones." Around the corner of the house lay a neat kitchen garden full of vegetables in thrifty green rows, a patch of the curious cabbages and in a field just over a fence, was tethered a pretty, soft-eyed Jersey cow.
There panic reigned, farmhouses and villages went up in smoke, and the fields were reddened with slaughter at each fresh incursion. Gentlemen in Williamsburg bore these misfortunes with reasonable fortitude, but Washington raged against the abuses and the inaction, and vowed that nothing but the imminent danger prevented his resignation.
A high row or ridge separates one field from another, and nothing else. In the next place, there are no isolated farm-houses. The people live in villages, from ten to fifty farmhouses grouped together, and the laborers go out from their homes to the fields each morning and return at evening.
The gendarmes dozed, one at each door. The train rushed lazily across the earth, between farmhouses, into fields, along woods ... the sunlight smacked my eye and cuffed my sleepy mind with colour. I was awakened by a noise of eating. My protectors, knife in hand, were consuming their meat and bread, occasionally tilting their bidons on high and absorbing the thin streams which spurted therefrom.
There were a great many inviting looking, quaint farmhouses, and big cottages scattered about, where the people from Milan are taken as lodgers. I had forgotten my nervousness about the tyres, when suddenly a queer thing happened.
The thud of their galloping hoofs interrupted many a country breakfast and brought many a woman and child to the door of the farmhouses as they passed. Five miles east of Sainte-Agnes they met the bishop in his open carriage, attended by two priests.
A matter of twenty kilometres was a mere trifle for infantry troopers. They walked as lightly as gymnasts, under a clear sky, through the fields, guided by the lights in the farmhouses, and at nine o'clock, having passed the frontier, they stumbled upon a post of Cossacks ambuscaded behind a hedge!
"It's stronger than we are stronger than anything else in the world," she said. "But you're not sorry?" I asked. "I don't want to think I don't care," she replied. "I only know that I love you. I wonder if you will ever know how much!" The moments lengthened into hours, and she gently reminded me that it was late. The lights in the little farmhouses near by had long been extinguished.
If she goes into a farmhouse as servant, the chances are in favour of her escaping temptation. But in farmhouses she may also sometimes run into the very jaws of danger. It is not uncommon in some districts for young labourers to sleep in the house, one or two who milk and have to be on the spot early.
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