Once Feel This, And You Will Soon Grow Happy
And Contented In Your Saddle-Home.
As for me and my comrade,
however, in this part of our journey we often forgot Stamboul,
forgot all the Ottoman Empire, and only remembered old times.
We
went back, loitering on the banks of Thames - not grim old Thames of
"after life," that washes the Parliament Houses, and drowns
despairing girls - but Thames, the "old Eton fellow," that wrestled
with us in our boyhood till he taught us to be stronger than he.
We bullied Keate, and scoffed at Larrey Miller, and Okes; we rode
along loudly laughing, and talked to the grave Servian forest as
though it were the "Brocas clump."
Our pace was commonly very slow, for the baggage-horses served us
for a drag, and kept us to a rate of little more than five miles in
the hour, but now and then, and chiefly at night, a spirit of
movement would suddenly animate the whole party; the baggage-horses
would be teased into a gallop, and when once this was done, there
would be such a banging of portmanteaus, and such convulsions of
carpet-bags upon their panting sides, and the Suridgees would
follow them up with such a hurricane of blows, and screams, and
curses, that stopping or relaxing was scarcely possible; then the
rest of us would put our horses into a gallop, and so all shouting
cheerily, would hunt, and drive the sumpter beasts like a flock of
goats, up hill and down dale, right on to the end of their journey.
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