At a corner between a gate and a wall
near the biscuit-factory of this town I saw a boy, whom I believe to
have been blind, standing jammed, at his wrist a chain-ring, and, at the
end of the chain, a dog; from his hap-hazard posture I conjectured that
he, and chain, and dog had been lifted from the street, and placed so,
by the storm of the 7th of the month; and what made it very curious was
that his right arm pointed a little outward just over the dog, so that,
at the moment when I first sighted him, he seemed a drunken fellow
setting his dog at me. In fact, all the dead I found much mauled and
stripped and huddled: and the earth seemed to be making an abortive
effort to sweep her streets.
Well, some little distance from Reading I saw a big flower-seed farm,
looking dead in some plots, and in others quite rank: and here again,
fluttering quite near the engine, two little winged aurelians in the
quiet evening air. I went on, passing a great number of crowded trains
on the down-line, two of them in collision, and very broken up, and one
exploded engine; even the fields and cuttings on either hand of the line
had a rather populous look, as if people, when trains and vehicles
failed, had set to trudging westward in caravans and streams.
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