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She waded out, still laughing; cast an apprehensive glance at the quarter from which her father might be expected to return, and set out on her journey to the house, the water squelching dismally in her boots at every step. In the garden at Billabong walked a slim youth in most correct attire.
"It's very tiny, of course; but it's a home, and when you've had nowhere to go to, not even a lodging " She broke off, and stared into the fire. "It's simply awful to have nowhere," she went on after a while. "To walk about hour after hour with the mud squelching through your shoes, and nothing to eat; and getting more hopeless as midnight comes on. I was out two whole nights."
The other horses too were frightened, and splashing through the water with their hobbled legs, and drawing their hoofs out of the thick mud with a squelching sound, they bounded out of the marsh. Laska stopped, looking ironically at the horses and inquiringly at Levin. Levin patted Laska, and whistled as a sign that she might begin.
Men had constructed it for the linking up of house with house, hamlet with hamlet. Like all roads, it represented the initial instinct of communal life, the basis of a reasoned social order, of civilization in short. He walked forward over the soft couch of fallen, water-soaked leaves, his boots squelching at times into inches of sucking mud, and his spirits rose.
His theory seemed to be that if the South were "let alone," a reconstruction of the Union could be satisfactorily effected by squelching the anti-slavery agitation, and that the Western States, at any rate, would find their true interest in uniting with the South, even if the other Northern States should refuse to do so.
"You have driven me out of this inn; I'll drive you out of the world," he murmured between his teeth, as his human steed with squelching boots tramped along with him through the endless mud. By the light of the fire the two men, one on the back of the other, resembled a half-submerged giant. And thus ended the fateful encounter of the two kinsmen at the "Break-'em-tear-'em" csárda.
Those field-gray men had to wade through a Slough of Despond to get to their line, and at night by Hooge where the lines were close together only a few yards apart our men could hear their boots squelching in the mud with sucking, gurgling noises. "They're drinking soup again!" said our humorists. There, at Hooge, Germans and English talked to one another, out of their common misery.
Being soaked all through, and through, and with water squelching in my boots, like a pump with a bad bucket, I was only too glad to find Annie's bright face, and quick figure, flitting in and out the firelight, instead of Lizzie sitting grandly, with a feast of literature, and not a drop of gravy.
It was a strange and dreary position for men whose ordinary lives ran through the lighted places of the world. The wind swept sadly over the dark fields. The mud clung to the squelching, dragging boots; now Mr. Fishwick was within an ace of the ditch on one side, now on the other, and now he brought up heavily against one of his companions.
He could remember every word she had said, and, having been on the rocks himself, he could understand what she had suffered the rain squelching through the thin little shoes, the bitter loneliness of the great city, the meals of bread and milk which had to last the whole day, the passionate longing for a home of some sort.
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