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Updated: May 15, 2025
As we descend at night to the lower regions, I think of the evening hymn that grandmother taught me when a child: "Lord, keep us safe this night, Secure from all our fears; May angels guard us while we sleep, Till morning light appears." June 7th, 1863. The weather has been dry a long time, and we hear of others dipping up the water from ditches and mud-holes.
They had come in covered with mud from their journey along the narrow forest path formed of a line of deep mud-holes made by the elephants themselves, every one of the huge animals invariably planting his feet in the track of the one which had preceded him.
There were two mud-holes which supplied water, and had a couple of palms near them, pretty well in the open, and a third spring a hundred yards from the others, larger and deeper, and apparently yielding a better supply than both the others put together, but so near a patch of rocks and thick mimosas which would afford dangerous cover to an enemy, should any be in the neighbourhood, that it would never do to camp close by it.
Reform comes in by any old trail it can find, mostly, and thanks its lucky stars if it doesn't run up against any bridges washed out or any mud-holes too deep to ford. We've got a good man for governor right now; not any too broad maybe, but good church good. Nobody has ever said he'd take a bribe; but he isn't heavy enough to sit on the lid and hold it down.
My hogs, young or old, have never been permitted to wallow in mud. We have no mud-holes at Four Oaks to grow stale and breed disease. The breeding hogs have exercise lots and baths, but the young growing and fattening stock have neither.
One never minds a hilly road where one can reach the bottom with an impetus that sends him spinning half-way up the next; but where mud-holes or washouts resolutely "hold the fort" in every depression, it is different, and the progress of the cycler is necessarily slow.
The Justice kicked away the stones with which he had made the wheel fast, seized the wagon by its tongue in order to test the mended tire, and in spite of its weight hauled it without exertion diagonally across the yard, so that the hens, geese and ducks, which had been quietly sunning themselves, flew, with loud cries, before the rattling vehicle, and a couple of pigs jumped up, grunting, from their mud-holes.
There was a regular track marked out by the various animals that frequented it; and the mud-holes formed by the elephants grew deeper and more given to spurt out water as the great animals passed on till the edge of the river was reached, when they plunged in on to what now seemed to be firm, gravelly soil, with the clear stream pressing against their sides, till the smaller elephant was pretty well breast-deep.
I remember shooting ptarmigan, and that we ate them; flashes of memory recall the steady downpour of rain through the endless twilight of shaggy forests; dim days on the foggy tundra, mud-holes from which the wild ducks rose in thousands; then the stunted hemlocks, then the forest again.
Ere I am through this swamp, the shades of night gather ominously around and settle down like a pall over the half-flooded flats; the road is full of mud-holes and pools of water, through which it is difficult to navigate, and I am in something of a quandary.
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