United States or France ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


They are dead tired, and the sight of the straw-filled barn is too much for some of them. They throw themselves down anywhere, and are asleep in a moment. When they wake up or more likely, are wakened up in an hour or two, they will be sorry. They will be stiff and sore, and their feet will be a torment.

Another officer came by, leading his patient, bleeding horse, over which was flung the dusty body of a brother soldier. The long convoy was moving more swiftly now; the air trembled with the cries of the mangled or the hoarse groans of the dying. A Sister of Mercy her frail arm in a sling crept on her knees among the wounded lying in a straw-filled cart.

For two or three hours, therefore, Osmond and the Seneschal's wife watched on each side of his bed, soothing his restlessness, until at length he became quiet, and at last dropped sound asleep. The sun was high in the heavens when Richard awoke. He turned on his straw-filled crib, and looked up.

He lashed himself up and down in the room, in horrible disgust and hate of his brother and of this home in his heart. He remembered his tender anticipations of the homecoming with a kind of self-pity and disgust. This was his greeting! He went to bed, to toss about on the hard, straw-filled mattress in the stuffy little best room.

Then he got on the thing and the animals galloped away. A few minutes later he returned, with her small trunk lashed to the back part of the sled. He entered the house and took a straw-filled pillow and a huge bearskin and bore them out. In the meanwhile Mrs. Olsen was helping Madge to resume her outlandish garb. "Mebbe Mr. Ennis he not know you vhen you come so all wrapped up.

On every highway, across every wood trail, footpath, and meadow streamed the wreckage of seven battle-fields. Through mud and rain crowded heavy artillery, waggons, herds of bellowing cattle, infantry, light batteries, exhausted men, wounded men, dead men on stretchers, men in straw-filled carts, some alive, some dying.

The boys might have sat there longer and, like boa-constrictors, gorged themselves into lethargy. However, adventure was ahead and the sound of the sledge bells excited the young people. They got on their coats and caps and furs and mittens and trooped out to the "pung," as the elder Jaroth called the low, deep, straw-filled sledge to which he had attached four strong farm horses.

At a small wayside station in a clearing in the forest his railway journey ended. Beside the one small stone building two elephants were standing, incessantly swinging their trunks, flapping their ears and shifting their weight restlessly from leg to leg. On the back of each great beast was a massive, straw-filled pad secured by a rope passing surcingle-wise around its body.

The machine-guns in carefully numbered parts came in cases as "agricultural implements," the big guns travelled in the boilers of locomotives, the empty cases of the shells, large and small, were packed in piano-cases, or in straw-filled crates as "hardware"; the black powder and the cordite and the lyddite came in round wooden American cheese-boxes, with a special mark; and the Mauser cartridges were soldered in tins like preserved meat.

Sprawled on their straw-filled mattresses, they loafed the hot and lazy days away in playing cards, eating the black bread, olives and garlic which they had brought with them, smoking a peculiarly strong and villainous tobacco, and torturing native musical instruments of various kinds.