"Thank the Fates!" I
murmured, and stopped to allow the comers to reach me, noting with a
grim smile that they were covered with mud from top to toe, and as
damp as a couple of Malvern hydropaths. Their plight was every whit as
pitiable as mine; and although the rain had not abated its flow or the
wind its strength, yet I almost felt as though it had grown fine
again. Corroborative proof of the sociability of the human race.
The two men who were stepping along the road in my direction, and
reconciling me by their crestfallen demeanor with the inclemencies of
the season, were peasants. The one was an old man, gray-haired,
stooping, and apparently sixty years of age: the other, his son, as I
afterward found out, was a mere youth of, at the most, twenty. They
were strikingly alike in physiognomy, notwithstanding the difference
in their years, but neither had anything at all remarkable either in
his looks or general appearance: both were small, clumsy-limbed,
somewhat simple-faced, rather ugly; and on the whole they were a very
commonplace, every-day-to-be-seen pair of countrymen.
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