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So the long, arduous day went. When they were not pulling, pushing, prying, and yelling, to get the wagons out of mudholes, they were rushing over the clogging, plowed fields to stand off the nagging rebel cavalry, which seemed to fill the country as full as the rain, the mud, the rocks and the sweeping cedars did.
I will admit that Fyne and I hung back for a moment before we made a plunge off the road into the bushes growing in a broad space at the foot of the towering limestone wall. These bushes were heavy with dew. There were also concealed mudholes in there. We crept and tumbled and felt about with our hands along the ground. We got wet, scratched, and plastered with mire all over our nether garments.
The railroad was still thirty miles away, and he had travelled mule-back through mudholes, on which, as the joke ran, a traveller was supposed to leave his card before he entered and disappeared that his successor might not unknowingly press him too hard. I do know that, in those mudholes, mules were sometimes drowned.
At last we met some men from the battalion that we were going to relieve, and they acted as guides; past tumble-down houses, along roads full of holes, in and out of mudholes. We were very careful at first, but we might just as well have walked through the lot, for we were all mud to our knees when we got in.
I can't fancy her in one of those out-of-the-way, God-forsaken little mudholes you call an English village, sitting in an early-Victorian drawing-room all the afternoon, waiting for the vicar's wife to come to tea, and taking a walk before dinner for entertainment, with an umbrella and mackintosh." "You've been reading Jane Austen," I told him. "Never heard of her," he replied promptly.
There was a touch of wistfulness about her, too; as of one whose benevolence must renounce all hope of comprehension and reward. Now, among those who observed her unusual expression was a gentleman of great dimensions disposed in a closed automobile that went labouring among mudholes in an unpaved outskirt of the town.
Seaforth groaned inwardly, but, knowing the futility of argument, shook his bridle and rode on, lurching a little in his saddle as the tired horse stumbled into mudholes and, brushed through dripping fern. By and by, however, Alton swung himself down in front of a lonely log-house with a big clearing behind it, where a man took their horses without a word and signed them to enter.
The Germans had sought refuge from the withering fire of the British guns in their dugouts, which rain and snow and sleet had converted into mudholes. The German soldiers were wet and cold and miserable, and offered but slight resistance. Three officers, nine non-coms., and 109 men surrendered to the British a larger number than the raiding party contained.
In these earlier days, the streets were mudholes divided by vacant fields and "beautified by trees, swamps, and cows." Departing for the West by way of Frederick, Baily, like all travelers, was intensely interested upon entering the rich limestone region which stretched from Pennsylvania far down into Virginia.
When the Green of some future History of the English People comes to review our times, he will, from his standpoint of comfort and convenience, find the present streets of London quite or even more incredibly unpleasant than are the filthy kennels, the mudholes and darkness of the streets of the seventeenth century to our enlightened minds. He will echo our question, "Why did people stand it?"
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