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Nothing was to be seen save that some body or bundle had been dragged through a low privet hedge which is in a line with the wood-pile. All that, of course, fits in with the official theory. I crawled about the lawn with an August sun on my back, but I got up at the end of an hour no wiser than before. "Well, after this fiasco I went into the bedroom and examined that also.
Besides, it is just possible that the rat may not yet have passed that way, for he does most of his business in the early morning, and it is not yet dawn." So he crossed over to the wood-pile and listened carefully, but could hear no groans, as he had expected; but, on consideration, he put this down to the wind, which he observed blew the sound away from him.
One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly.
And although within ten feet of the soldiers as they marched by, they were never seen, for the pen was completely covered by the winter's wood-pile, except at the back, where there was a board fence through whose cracks the corn was thrown in.
I had never been on a large steamboat before, and after tying my knapsack and other baggage to a wood-pile on the lower deck, after I had vainly attempted to induce the proper official to give me checks for my baggage, I began to climb up stairs, and soon found myself on top of the Texas, beside the smoke stack, viewing the ever changing scenery of the grand old Mississippi.
In the meantime, Hard had entered the living-room and was examining the contents of the wood-box. "Empty, of course!" he said, with a smile. "The household is quite evidently off its balance." He went out through the kitchen and returned in a few minutes with a basket of logs from the wood-pile.
Within convenient distance of the house, likewise, was the bake-oven, built of boulders, mortar, and earth, with the wood-pile near by. Here with roaring fires once or twice each week the family baking was done. Round the various buildings ran some sort of fence, whether of piled stones or rails, and in a corner of the enclosed plot was the habitant's garden.
Near the kitchen was a well surrounded by a curb, with a pulley fastened to a bent iron rod clasped by a vine whose leaves were withered, reddened, and shrivelled by the season. From thence the tortuous shoots straggled to the wall, clutched it, and ran the whole length of the house, ending near the wood-pile, where the logs were ranged with as much precision as the books in a library.
The latter was incapable of reasoning and therefore of understanding why it was that he was being beaten. The two were beside a wood-pile and the demented one was crying. In a moment the old patriarch had jumped out of his conveyance, leaped over the fence, and confronted the amazed attendant with an uplifted arm. "Not another lick!" he fairly shouted. "What do you mean by striking an idiot?"
But he and Elizabeth went about here and there, in the yard and up and down the well-swept walk from the gate to the door, where the snow lay still on either side as high as the squire's shoulder, and Elizabeth talked to him about the great wood-pile, and praised the industry and energy of Nathan Pell, the hired man, and of his team, Dick and Doll, that were making it longer every day.
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