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Updated: June 6, 2025
The road-mending season is in full swing now, but no amount of road-mending could account for such a comprehensive compass as we were fetching. For a moment I thought that the revolution had begun. "'Busful of Bourgeoisie Kidnapped" would make a good head-line for the papers. Or perhaps it was merely a private enterprise.
The poor fellow was first set to work on a piece of road-mending just outside the city gate, with several others martyrs and criminals in similar condemnation. And here Mark and his companions met him unexpectedly before they were aware that the fearful punishment had begun. At the time poor Mamba was toiling with pick and shovel. His heart was almost broken.
In a secondary degree it is useful as a commercial highway, the barge traffic being really useful to the people on its banks, where coal, stone for road-mending, wood, flour, and other heavy and necessary goods are delivered on the staithes almost at their doors.
The foreman jumped on the truck and rode away, and Archie bent his back to the barrow, resolving that never again would he complain of bumps in a road now that he knew the heart-breaking and back-breaking labor of road-mending. On the whole he did a good job; it was remarkable how interested one could become in so contemptible a task.
There had been a good deal of road-mending going on, and even where the stones were not freshly laid down there were a great many loose ones about.
Road-mending is a cause of much destruction of antiquarian objects in all countries, even in Italy, where the law has been invoked to protect ancient monuments from the highway authorities. We need not record the legal enactments of other Governments, so admirably summarized by Mr. Bond in his paper read before the Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club.
All were, as he had predicted, greatly shocked at the aspect of the country through which they passed: the meagre crops ripening for harvest, the hay- carts, sometimes drawn by an equally lean cow and woman, the haggard women bearing heavy burthens, and the ragged, barefooted children leading a wretched cow or goat to browse by the wayside, the gaunt men toiling at road-mending with their poor starved horses, or at their seigneur's work, alike unpaid, even when drawn off from their own harvests.
We came just here on a gang of men road-mending which delayed us a little; but I was not sorry for it; for all I had seen hitherto seemed a mere part of a summer holiday; and I wanted to see how this folk would set to on a piece of real necessary work. They had been resting, and had only just begun work again as we came up; so that the rattle of the picks was what woke me from my musing.
"Do you know a vortex filament from a diametral plane?" demanded King. Burns laughed. "Come, let's be off! I must spare half an hour to show Mrs. King a certain view somewhat off the main line." The afternoon was gone before they could have believed it, detours though there were several, as there usually are in a road-mending season.
The most serious objection to the absurd system of road-mending so common in this country lies in the fact that the annual repairing is little more than the ploughing up and throwing back upon the roadway of the soft and unsuitable material which has been washed into the gutters.
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