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Updated: June 14, 2025
The lowing of a cow in the quiet meadows, the splash of a trout in the fish-pond, the last notes of a tired bird, the creaking of wagon-wheels upon the distant road, every now and then breaking the evening silence, only made the stillness of the place seem more intense. It was almost oppressive, this twilight stillness.
He was like the sparrows of the capital; black with soot, but full of an urban sharpness, they slip in and out among the heavy wagon-wheels, and know everything. He was always getting into difficulties, but always came home with a whole skin. His continual running about seemed to have got into his blood like a never-resting impulse.
They were blandly gazing at the Cap'n's curios ranged on mantel and what-not. It was a snort from Constable Swanton that gave the alarm. Mr. Nute's team was spinning away down the road, the wagon-wheels throwing slush with a sort of fireworks effect. Cap'n Sproul, like most sailors, was not a skilful driver, but he was an energetic one. The horse was galloping.
Already the snow was being shoveled from door-steps and sidewalks, and the laughter of the boys as they worked, the scraping of their shovels, the rumble of wagon-wheels, which were making deep brown ruts in the middle of the street, reached him with the muffled sound of something far away, and, watching, he missed no detail of what was going on below. "Goodness gracious!
It was searching into a scene beyond this bright sunlight and the far green-brown grass, and the little oasis of trees in the distance marking a homestead, and the dust of the wagon-wheels out on the trail beyond the grain-elevator beyond the blue horizon's rim, quivering in the heat, and into regions where this crisp, clear, life-giving, life-saving air never blew.
As we had measured the distance from the township lines by counting the revolutions of our wagon-wheels, so now with pocket compass and a couple of laths, Charles and I laid out inner boundaries and claimed three quarter-sections, one for Frank and one each for ourselves. Level as a floor these acres were, and dotted with the bones of bison.
The twenty men marched straight toward the barrier, but from behind the beams, from among the wagon-wheels and from the heights of the rocks a terrible fusillade burst forth and at the same time Planchet's halberdiers appeared at the corner of the Cemetery of the Innocents, and Louvieres's bourgeois at the corner of the Rue de la Monnaie.
Even the creak of the wagon-wheels was muffled. Through the semicircular aperture in the front of the wagon-cover the horns of the oxen were dimly seen amidst the serried flakes; the snow whitened the backs of the beasts and added its burden to their yoke.
Without tents, with thin and ragged clothes, most of them without shoes, "many hundreds of the soldiers tracking the ground with their bloody feet," they retreated at the rate of seventeen miles a day along barely passable roads, the wagon-wheels sinking deep in the mud, and every creek swollen with the rains.
On a summer day like this anyone listening at the Hall could hear the busy noises, the hum of this little hive of humanity, with perfect clearness; the beat of the hammer on the anvil in Matthew Hale's smithy, the "Gee, whoa!" of the carter on the distant road, the scrunching of the wagon-wheels, the crowing cocks, and now and then the shouts of boys and the laughter of children.
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