I wanted
to say good-by to somebody, but I really couldn't feel sorry to see
the last of any one of those we passed in the streets--they were such
a dirty, unhappy-looking lot, and the railroad wall ran on forever
apparently, and we might have been in a foreign country for all we
knew of it. There were just sooty gray brick tenements and gas-works
on one side, and the railroad cutting on the other, and semaphores and
telegraph wires overhead, and smoke and grime everywhere, it looked
exactly like the sort of street that should lead to a prison, and it
seemed a pity to take a smart hansom and a good cob into it.
"It was just a bit different from our last ride together--when we rode
through the night from Krugers-Dorp with hundreds of horses' hoofs
pounding on the soft veldt behind us, and the carbines clanking
against the stirrups as they swung on the sling belts. We were being
hunted then, harassed on either side, scurrying for our lives like the
Derby Dog in a race-track when every one hoots him and no man steps
out to help--we were sick for sleep, sick for food, lashed by the
rain, and we knew that we were beaten; but we were free still, and
under open skies with the derricks of the Rand rising like gallows on
our left, and Johannesburg only fifteen miles away."
MISS DELAMAR'S UNDERSTUDY
A young man runs two chances of marrying the wrong woman. He marries
her because she is beautiful, and because he persuades himself that
every other lovable attribute must be associated with such beauty, or
because she is in love with him.
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