Groat

“ Then the Water-mill, beyond the fallen steps overgrown with the thistle: itself a ruin, mud-built at first, now propped on both sides;—the planks torn from its cattle-shed; a feeble beam, splintered at the end, set against the dwelling-house from the ruined pier of the watercourse; the old millstone—useless for many a day—half buried in slime, at the bottom of the wall; the listless children, listless dog, and the poor gleaner bringing her single sheaf to be ground. Then the “Peat bog,” with its cold, dark rain, and dangerous labor. ”

“ More gruesome meals are credited to them by those who have witnessed their proceedings on a wreck strewn shore where loss of life had been involved. A terror also on the grouse moors, they devour both eggs and young, and even the sitting grouse herself is not safe from him. ”

“ The clammy grey dust, like hot sand thrown from ramparts, ate to the core of everything, choking the shrivelled pores and stifling the languid breath. Old gaffers were talking of murrain in cattle, and famine and plague among men, and farmers were too badly off to grumble. ”

“ At a market, tottery old men and women were searching in the garbage thrown in the mud for rotten potatoes, beans, and vegetables, while little children clustered like flies around a festering mass of fruit, thrusting their arms to the shoulders into the liquid corruption, and drawing forth morsels, but partially decayed, which they devoured on the spot. ”

“ Even mud is better to work in than dust, which rises, and chokes and blinds you, and annoys the bullocks, and makes the entrance to the race puzzlingly obscure. Luckily these yards were not very often used, and had a thin carpet of grass, otherwise the job would have been a more difficult and lengthy one. As it was, when the cattle were finally divided into their respective mobs, and the boys came out of the yard, their features were somewhat indefinite, thanks to the coating of dust that covered each cheerful countenance. ”

“ Filth and desolation all around. Shattered farmsteads half buried in the mud; shattered gardens trampled into mud. A weary land of foulness, breeding foulness; tangled wire the only harvest of the fields; mile after mile of gaping holes, filled with muddy water; stinking carcases of dead horses; birds of prey clinging to broken fences, flapping their great wings.
A land where man died, and vermin increased and multiplied. Vermin on your body, vermin in your head, vermin in your food, vermin waiting for you in your bed ”

“ Everywhere the deep mulch forming the floor of the forest grasps the descending rains and melting snows and guides them into the deeper recesses of the earth. Where the forests have been destroyed, or even the mulch and litter forming the forest floor, as it so often is by fire or the excessive grazing of sheep, the rains for the most part, instead of sinking into the soil, pass over the surface, carrying silt and other debris into the streams and reservoirs, causing vital injury to irrigation enterprises. ”

“ When the heavy rains of spring and fall occur, the effluent water from those slopes is dilute sewage, dilute human excrement, and, especially if the land has been recently ploughed, a large quantity of the surface-soil, and with it the freshly-applied human excreta, and the remaining noxious parts of the previously-applied batch of filth still present in the soil, must necessarily be, and is, washed down-hill and into the water-supply of the town. ”

“ Hence every considerable shower lays bare its roods of rock, and the torrents sent down by the thaws of spring, and by occasional heavy discharges of the summer and autumnal rains, are seas of mud and rolling stones that sometimes lay waste and bury beneath them acres, and even miles, of pasture and field and vineyard. ”

“ Even living birds were coated with mud, while for some days after the eruption the poor bewildered cattle roamed about this dreary wilderness mad with hunger and thirst, gnawing boughs of trees or decayed wood, bellowing pitifully, and with eyes bloodshot and nostrils choked with greasy slate-coloured mud, which lay an inch thick all over their coats. ”

“ Indeed, it seems wonderful that the unfortunate people ever reaped any harvests at all, when we read the list of forces arrayed against them. If there were no inundations, sweeping away the produce of their fields, to say nothing of the houses in which they lived and occasionally the men themselves, there was pretty sure to be a drought; or if not a drought, a swarm of grasshoppers or of locusts would devastate the plains, selecting, as, with a sort of infernal instinct, such creatures do, the richest and most fertile districts as their prey. ”

“ A mud-house is being built near by, and between the cooking and attending to passing travelers, two women are digging the earth and filling up the baskets, while the men are mixing the mud, filling in the oblong wooden trough, and thus building the wall. At my elbow a man—old and grizzled and dirty—is turning back roll upon roll of his wadded garments, and ridding it of as many as he can find of the insects with which it is infested. ”

“ So I said cheerfully to myself, “God and Robert are a multitude,” and my bread will be given, and my water sure.
The summer came on hot and early, and was accompanied by a great drought. Pitiful tales came into town of the suffering for water at outlying farms, the creeks having dried up, and even the larger rivers showing great depletion. Then the cattle and game began to die of thirst, and of some awful disease called “black tongue.” Thousands lay dead upon the prairies, which were full of deep and wide fissures, made by the cracking and parting of the hot, dry earth. ”

“ She goes then curtsying and dimpling over the shining gravel, sliding from beneath the ice that roofs her on the uplands down to the softer valleys, where her quickened step will be heard by the frogs in their mansions of mud, and the fish, recluses in rayless pools, will rise to the light she brings. ”

“ Down beats the hail like pebbles. It strikes upon the vines, scorches and blackens them. The wheat is leveled to the ground. The river suddenly swells into a raging torrent. Its turbid waters bear away the riches of the poor—the cow that served a little household and followed the children, lowing, to reedy meadows bathed by limpid streams—a horse caught browsing in a peaceful vale, thinking no ill—great trees hurling destruction with them. Rafters, roofs of houses, sometimes a battered corpse, float by. ”

“ When the rumpled soil had been smoothed back and plowed and harrowed, and sown to grass, and when the grass had sprouted as promptly as it did, there stood forth a dimpling green expanse where before had been a damp, moldy and almost impenetrable tangle, hiding treasure-troves of old tin cans, heaps of rusted and broken farming implements and here and there the bleached-out bones of a dead cow or a deceased horse. ”

“ No wonder, for the rain has washed the roof, and has carried off a supply of collected dust and soot. Not the roofs of houses alone, but the streets, the walls, the pavements, in a town—the trees, hedges, grass, roads, in the country—are all relieved of dusty layers, while, if the rain be heavy enough, sand and soil also are swept away. ”

“ The pastures become parched deserts—the sheep eat the grass to the roots—the waterholes are poisoned by the bodies of cattle suffocated in sloughs when struggling for drink, and thousands of stock of all kinds perish either before moving or while on the road to districts which the drought has not affected. ”

“ The roads are all covered with brownish slush, in which future paths are already beginning to show; the roofs and side-walks are dry; the fresh young green is piercing through the rotting grass of last year, under the fences. In the gutters there is the merry gurgling and foaming of dirty water, in which the sunbeams do not disdain to bathe. Chips, straws, the husks of sunflower seeds are carried rapidly along in the water, whirling round and sticking in the dirty foam. ”

“ The usual cry of the bittern is, as already mentioned, a hoarse, raven-like croak; and it is only during the breeding-season that the male utters the resounding boom, which has been compared to the bellowing of a bull, and on a still night may be heard at a distance of a mile or more. ”

“ It is difficult to say which would be worse--a fall from the stool by daylight into the embers of a wood fire, or the shuddering slimy waking about midnight, after a nod more vigorous than the rest, to find oneself plunged in eight cold inches of soft mud. ”

“ Unless the weather is quite dry for a week or more, the rough ground and deer grass, both of which it is most desirable to burn in the interest of grouse and sheep, will not burn, and when your staff of men are collected and got together, a sudden storm of rain or snow comes on, and you are delayed for a week, and perhaps put off altogether for that season. ”

“ The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. ”

“ The corn, so carefully hidden in pits, has been burned; the water, on which life itself depends, has been polluted; the peasants are vainly digging in search of the hard-earned paper money, savings which they had buried beneath the soil, only to turn up a few black cinders! ”

“ As some readers may be aware, the heather is systematically fired, usually in spring, so that a supply of tender shoots from the resprouting ling may be furnished as food for the Grouse. Great judgment and care are required, or vast tracts of cover may be ruined for years. We have known farmers so destroy many acres of valuable Grouse cover purely to secure pasturage for sheep. ”

“ Black mud, as everlasting as the perennial snows which rest on the summits of inaccessible mountains, decayed vegetables of every season of the year, refuse fish, unpicked bones of every conceivable variety of animals, deceased cats and dogs and rats in every possible degree of decomposition, broken bricks and tiles, and shreds of earthen vessels of all variety of domestic application, sticks, stones, old shoes, tin kettles and superannuated old saucepans, formed the dead stock of the street. ”

“ As long as the corpse has not been taken out of the water, so long shall that water be unclean and unfit to drink. They shall, therefore, take the corpse out of the water, and lay it down on the dry ground. After the corpse has been taken out, and the snow or the hail has melted, the water is clean, and both cattle and men may drink of it at their pleasure, as before."
O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! What part of the water of a running stream does the Drug Nasu defile with corruption, infection, and pollution? ”

“ Thirty or forty years ago, as we were told, it was a sheep pasture, but the sheep being worried by the fleas, began to paw the ground, till they broke the sod, and so the sand began to blow, till now it had extended over forty or fifty acres. This evil might easily have been remedied at first, by spreading birches with their leaves on over the sand, and fastening them down with stakes, to break the wind. The flies bit the sheep, and the sheep bit the ground, and the sore had spread to this extent. It is astonishing what a great sore a little scratch breedeth. ”

“ Water-supply almost entirely from shallow wells, often uncovered, mostly in the cottage garden, not far from a pervious privy pit, a pig-sty, or a huge collection of house refuse, polluted by the foulness soaking into it. The liquid manure from the pig-sty trickles through the ground into the well. Often after heavy rain the cottagers complain that their well-water becomes thick. ”

“ Then him dig dirt in floor with hands, and cover up when they bring him bread and water—and he hide his hands all the time, fingers so much bleed. Then when dark and no moon, him dig out last dirt, him come up outside. ”

“ Twenty-four hours more elapsed, and sheep, caught in hedgerows by the wool, were dragged through the mud and slime.
Lower down the river an ox or two were found, while news came of other carcases, miles away, stranded in bends where gravel and mud had half-buried them. ”

“ If what Uncle Si tells me is true I cannot be too glad that I have what is even more efficacious than a pull at the City Hall—a friend in Editor Woodsit.
XIV THE VICTIM OF AN ORDINANCE.
And now that a plentiful supply of water was provided, it seemed proper to celebrate by giving the lawn (poor abused thing!) a deluge of the refreshing element. The exceeding ardor of the sun and the absence of rain had wrought havoc with the grass and shrubbery. The drought seemed determined to finish the work of destruction which the workmen, with their picks and spades, had begun. ”

“ There must be something radically wrong where fresh meat becomes tainted in a single night. [110]
What shall we say of the poisoning of our wells [62] and water-supplies by too adjacent burial-grounds? Professor Brande has instanced a case of a well near a churchyard, the water of which had derived not only odour, but colour, from the soil, and gave it as his opinion that the water in all superficial springs near burial-grounds is simply filtered through accumulated decomposition. ”

“ The roads are dry and terribly dusty, the grass is dead, the streams all dried up, and the only green objects to be seen, as you look across the country, are the trees and grape-vines and occasionally a few acres of shriveled-up corn. And these are covered so thickly with dust that the color underneath is hardly discernible. ”