This selection added a few hundred
square miles to the territory of the Brazilian province of Matto
Grosso, but, in spite of the protests and objections of Paraguay, the
boundary treaty has been made on the basis of the Brazilian idea of
what is right between the two governments. The liberty of opinion
accorded to Paraguay by Brazil is merely the liberty which a cat
grants to a captive mouse, to run about within reach of its sheathed
claws.
A TALE OF THE CONSCRIPTION.
One afternoon, some years ago, I was walking along a narrow old road
which leads from Le Crotay, a fishing-village in Picardy, to the town
of St. Valery-sur-Somme. It was in the month of February, and one of
those luckless days on which cold, wind and rain all seem banded in
league against the comfort of mankind: the sky, dull and lowering,
presented to the eye nothing but a bleak, cheerless desert of gray,
relieved only by troops of dark, inky clouds, which would at moments,
as though flying the fury of a raging storm, roll pell-mell through
the air like an army in rout, pouring down at the same time through
the thick, black fog that covered land and sea like a pall a deluge of
cold, heavy water, which occasional blasts of a violent north-west
wind would lash into whistling, pelting and drenching gusts.
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