Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

rough medley dress of homespun stuff and hairy skins of beasts,

the powerful frame attenuated by spare living, and the sullen and

desperate compression of the lips in sleep, inspired the mender of

roads with awe. The traveller had travelled far, and his feet were

footsore, and his ankles chafed and bleeding; his great shoes,

stuffed with leaves and grass, had been heavy to drag over the

many long leagues, and his clothes were chafed into holes, as he

himself was into sores. Stooping down beside him, the road

mender tried to get a peep at secret weapons in his breast or

where not; but, in vain, for he slept with his arms crossed upon

him, and set as resolutely as his lips. Fortified towns with their

stockades, guardhouses, gates, trenches, and drawbridges, seemed

to the mender of roads, to be so much air as against this figure.

And when he lifted his eyes from it to the horizon and looked

around, he saw in his small fancy similar figures, stopped by no

obstacle, tending to centres all over France.

The man slept on indifferent to showers of hail and intervals of

brightness, to sunshine on his face and shadow, to the pattering

lumps of dull ice on his body and the diamonds into which the sun

changed them, until the sun was low in the west, and the sky was

glowing. Then, the mender of roads having