All The Houses Were Jumbled Up Together Just Anyhow, And How Any Man Who Lived In The Middle Could Get Home Without Climbing Over Half The Other Houses In The Place I Could Not Make Out.

They were the sort of villages where a man's mother-in-law, coming to pay him a visit, might wander around all day, hearing him, and even now and then seeing him, yet never being able to get at him in consequence of not knowing the way in.

A drunken man, living in one of these villages, could never hope to get home. He would have to sit down outside, and wait till his head was clear.

We witnessed the opening scenes of a very amusing little comedy at one of the towns where the train drew up. The chief characters were played by an active young goat, a small boy, an elderly man and a woman, parents of the small boy and owners of the goat, and a dog.

First we heard a yell, and then, from out a cottage opposite the station, bounded an innocent and happy goat, and gambolled around. A long rope, one end of which was fastened to his neck, trailed behind him. After the goat (in the double sense of the phrase) came a child. The child tried to catch the goat by means of the rope, caught itself in the rope instead, and went down with a bump and a screech. Whereupon a stout woman, the boy's mother apparently, ran out from the cottage, and also made for the goat. The goat flew down the road, and the woman flew after it. At the first corner, the woman trod on the rope, and then SHE went down with a bump and a screech. Then the goat turned and ran up the street, and, as it passed the cottage, the father ran out and tried to stop it. He was an old man, but still seemed to have plenty of vigour in him. He evidently guessed how his wife and child had gone down, and he endeavoured to avoid the rope and to skip over it when it came near him. But the goat's movements were too erratic for him. His turn came, and he trod on the rope, and went down in the middle of the road, opposite his own door, with a thud that shook us all up against each other as we stood looking out of the carriage-window, and sat there and cursed the goat. Then out ran a dog, barking furiously, and he went for the goat, and got the end of the rope in his teeth and held on to it like grim death. Away went the goat, at his end of the rope, and, with him, the dog at the other end. Between them, they kept the rope about six inches above the ground, and with it they remorselessly mowed down every living thing they came across in that once peaceful village.

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