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In place of the grand mud-colored brown fronts of San Francisco, I saw dwellings built of straw, adobies, and cream-colored pebble-and-shell-conglomerated coral, cut into oblong blocks and laid in cement; also a great number of neat white cottages, with green window-shutters; in place of front yards like billiard-tables with iron fences around them, I saw these homes surrounded by ample yards, thickly clad with green grass, and shaded by tall trees, through whose dense foliage the sun could scarcely penetrate; in place of the customary geranium, calla lily, etc., languishing in dust and general debility, I saw luxurious banks and thickets of flowers, fresh as a meadow after a rain, and glowing with the richest dyes; in place of the dingy horrors of San Francisco's pleasure grove, the "Willows," I saw huge-bodied, wide-spreading forest trees, with strange names and stranger appearance trees that cast a shadow like a thunder-cloud, and were able to stand alone without being tied to green poles; in place of gold fish, wiggling around in glass globes, assuming countless shades and degrees of distortion through the magnifying and diminishing qualities of their transparent prison houses, I saw cats Tom-cats, Mary Ann cats, long-tailed cats, bob-tailed cats, blind cats, one-eyed cats, wall-eyed cats, cross-eyed cats, gray cats, black cats, white cats, yellow cats, striped cats, spotted cats, tame cats, wild cats, singed cats, individual cats, groups of cats, platoons of cats, companies of cats, regiments of cats, armies of cats, multitudes of cats, millions of cats, and all of them sleek, fat, lazy and sound asleep.
A great splash of slimy red mud fell full on the front of my spotless white jacket, another struck in the water close by the side of the boat. The wounded crocodile had sprung into the air from his tail up, and dropped back into his wallow with a resounding thud. In another instant he was off the slippery bank and within the security of the mud-colored water.
We continued along the plain between the ranges, which later receded into the distance, as if retiring for the night. Flat, mud-colored, Palestinian adobe huts stood here and there in the moonlight among patches of a sort of palm bush. Monterey proved quite a city. Yet how the ways of the Spaniard appeared even here!
No wonder the soldier-poet doggereled "It's the horns of the cootie and beg-bug, The herring and mud-colored crows, My strongest impression of Russia, Gets into my head through my nose." Bathing is a strenuous sport pursued by almost every individual with avidity. It is carried on in special bath-houses of two or more rooms, found in the yard of almost every peasant family.
There are its mud-colored towns and architecture, its rude life, rough skinned, hairy, ferocious, with tastelessness prevailing. The German imagination is never shot through with clear, happy sunshine. The German emotions are distinctively expressed by thumpings in some form.
From the fronts of their dwellings the view is superb: the broad piazzas are hung here and there with hammocks, telling of luxurious out-door life; family groups are seen taking their morning coffee on the verandas, and the voices of many children ring out, clear and bird-like, floating up to the eyrie where we are perched; down towards the shore lies brown, dingy, dirty Tangier, with its mud-colored groups of tiled roofs, its teeming population, its mouldy old walls, its Moorish arched gates, and its minarets, square and dominant.
At last I arrived at a kind of embankment, where I could see the great mud-colored stream slip- ping along in the soundless darkness. It had come on to rain, I know not what had happened to the moon, and the whole place was anything but gay. It was not what I had looked for; what I had looked for was in the irrecoverable past.
"What is that coming here along the road?" asked Miss Roberta, stepping upon the porch, and pointing out the distant vehicle. Peggy stood up straight, let her arms hang close to her sides, and looked steadfastly forth. "Wot's comin', Miss Rob," said she, "is the buggy 'longin' to Mister Michaels, at de Springs, an' his ole mud-colored hoss is haulin' it.
Tufts of poplars, wood islands on the prairie, skulking coyotes, that prowled to the top of some earth mound and uttered their weird cries, mud-colored badgers, hulking clumsily away to their treacherous holes, gophers, sly fellows, propped on midget tails pointing fore-paws at us these and other common things stole the hours away.
The city, with its countless minarets and domed mosques, its public buildings and tree-adorned squares, its section of mud-colored houses and terraced roofs, lies in the form of a crescent at the visitor's feet, while the plains of Lower Egypt stretch far away in all directions.
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