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Where was I? I had a faint remembrance of jolting in a wagon, and of pitying faces bent over me, but where was I now? Again I opened my eyes, and noted the gay patchwork covering of the bed, and the green paper curtain of the window in the golden wall green, with a tall yellow flower-pot on it, with sprawling roses of blue and red.
A few bad roads that penetrate it, a few jolting wagons that traverse them, a few barn-like boarding-houses on the edge of the forest, where the boarders are soothed by patent coffee, and stimulated to unnatural gayety by Japan tea, and experimented on by unique cookery, do little to destroy the savage fascination of the region.
I felt that I was almost leaving the earth, despite the rumbling and the jolting, when I thought of my destination. The heavy clouds and the swishing rain held no gloom for me. For above the clouds was the broad, blue sky, with the sun somewhere in it, and somewhere beyond the curtain of the rain was light and warmth and blooming fields.
Hitherto, the roads had been fair, but now the jolting and swaying became very pronounced. "Beastly road!" shouted Barton "and stiff gradient!" I nodded. That part of the way which was visible in front had the appearance of a muddy cataract, through which we must force a path. Then, as abruptly as it had commenced, the rain ceased; and at almost the same moment came an angry cry from behind.
Thus we went down gallantly and in very high style, with his Grace much delighted at being told that never had king or subject made such pace in his travelling since the memory of man began. Here was reward enough for all the jolting, the flogging of horses, and the pain of yokels pressed unwillingly into pushing the coach with their shoulders through miry places.
So, under a blue cloud of wood smoke, and amid blinding fibrous dust, panting men, jolting wagons, and the musical whir of the separator, the work went on, until the thrashers departed, taking their pay with them.
On one of my trips over the road, when a fellow-passenger made a remark about the severe jolting that almost shook us off our seats, an elderly Dominican gentleman observed: "My friend, you evidently never took a trip from Santiago to Puerto Plata before the railroad was built. Compared with travel then, this mode of conveyance is like being carried in angels' arms."
On the platform between our carriage and the next the guard was standing with his elbows on the railing, looking in the direction of the beautiful girl, and his battered, wrinkled, unpleasantly beefy face, exhausted by sleepless nights and the jolting of the train, wore a look of tenderness and of the deepest sadness, as though in that girl he saw happiness, his own youth, soberness, purity, wife, children; as though he were repenting and feeling in his whole being that that girl was not his, and that for him, with his premature old age, his uncouthness, and his beefy face, the ordinary happiness of a man and a passenger was as far away as heaven....
And indeed she was delighted, with a sort of childish delight, to sit in this swift hansom, bowling along the smooth thoroughfare; and she chatted and chattered in her gay, rapid, disconnected fashion; and she had nothing but contempt for the shabby Neapolitan fiacre and the jolting streets that Leo of course remembered; and when at last she found herself and her companion of old days seated at a small, clean, bright window-table in the Restaurant Gianuzzi they being the only occupants of the long saloon she fairly clapped her little hands together in her gladness.
The women learned that the jolting wagons would churn their milk, and when a halt occurred it took them but a short time to heat an oven hollowed out of the hillside, in which to bake the bread already raised." Colonel Kane says that he saw a piece of cloth, the wool for which was sheared, dyed, spun, and woven, during the march.
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