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So finely tuned was his sympathy that for one fleeting moment he saw a homely, hilly farm in Michigan, with rail fences and a squat old house with wide porch and hard-beaten path from the kitchen door to the well and on to the stables; and down a long slope that was topped with great old trees, Alexander P. Dill shambling contentedly, driving with a crooked stick three mild-mannered old cows.
Herbert gets the occasional tonic of a brisk walk over the hard-beaten snow, of a moonlight winter's night. A walk-only think of it! over the crisp, crunching snow, to the distant outlying hamlet of Paton's Corner, where a few are gathered in the little school-house to hear him preach, and to give him the happy relief of a five-mile tramp home again.
He led both horses forward, moving slowly and with that silent caution so characteristic of his class. With scarcely the scraping of a hoof on the flinty rocks we came forth in safety upon the defined, hard-beaten track. "The south is over yonder ter the left," he whispered, as he swung up into saddle, "an' the trend of the road is mighty nigh due west."
Slowly and in silence the groups of spectators broke up and sauntered away as the last of the prisoners dragged back into the guard-house, and the guard itself broke ranks and went within doors, leaving only the sentry pacing mechanically the narrow, hard-beaten path, the sergeant, and at the turn of the road, the young lieutenant whom Captain Kress had addressed as Mr. Ray.
Then north for five miles. The road was as level as a table top a good, smooth, hard-beaten, age-mellowed prairie-grade. The land to east and west was also level; binders were going and whirring their harvest song. Nobody could have felt more contented than I did.
Leading from the path of bare, hard-beaten earth that ran around the house through the grass, was a small forking path not so wide and well defined, yet a path, leading to George's window. She stood staring at it a long time with a thoughtful expression on her face. That night she did not go to bed when she went to her room.
Standpipes are fixed all along the hall. There are, in addition, some out-buildings used by the management and as stores. In the other camp sections new barracks, measuring as a rule 100 by 39 feet, were erected by a building firm. Walls and roof are of wood and thatch; the floor is hard-beaten earth. All camp quarters are well open to the air, so that proper ventilation presents no difficulties.
I was seated on a mossy log, counting the treasures which I had been gathering, when the clatter of hoof-strokes on the clayey and hard-beaten road arrested my attention, and, looking up for the wood thinned off in the direction of the highway, and left it distinctly in view I saw Doctor H , the physician, in attendance upon my sick companion. The visit was an unseasonable one.
The room was dark though it was summer, and although it had two windows, one to the street, and one to the garden behind: both ceiling and floor were of a dark brown, for the beams and boards of the one were old and interpenetrated with smoke, and the other was of hard-beaten clay, into which also was wrought much smoke and an undefinable blackness, while the windows were occupied with different plants favoured of Grannie, so that little light could get in, and that little was half-swallowed by the general brownness.
The trail they took ran through the grass, a sinuous riband of hard-beaten soil that flashed where it caught the light. It was seamed by ruts and fringed by wild barley but in places the grass had spread across it, leaving gaps, into which the horses' legs and the wheel sank. The smell of wild peppermint rose from among the crackling stalks as the team brushed through.
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