Half-way up we met a string of ponies, and I
underwent a few nervous moments until they had passed in the twenty-inch
road--a slight tilt, a slip, a splutter, probably a yell, and I should
have dropped 500 feet without a bump.
As we went along together, just before reaching this hill, we saw women
carrying bags of rice. They saw us, too. One passed me safely, but with
fear. The others carelessly dropping their burdens, scampered off,
afraid of their lives; and when one of my soldiers (whose sense of humor
was on a par with my own when as a boy I used to stick butterscotch
drops on the bald head of my Sunday School teacher, and bend pins for
small boys to sit on and rise from) shouted to them, they dived straight
as a die over the hedge into a submerged rice-field, and made a sorry
spectacle with their "lily" feet and pale blue trousers, covered with
the thin mud. In struggling to get away, one of them, the silly
creature, went sprawling on all fours in the slime, and with only the
imperfect footing possible to her with her little stumps, she would have
been submerged, had not the man who had frightened her, at my bidding,
gone to drag her out. As it was, they looked anything but beautiful with
their wet and muddy garments clinging tightly to their bodies, and
betraying every curve of their not unbeautiful figures.
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