On the floor, thick with dust and dirt, scraps of stuff and ends of thread, sat some dozen haggard, untidy, shoeless men, with a mingled look of care and recklessness that made me shudder.

"Ye'll just mind the shop, and dust the books whiles," he said.

In contemplating the feat of this extraordinary man, it must appear to every one, that his bodily prowess, gigantic as it is, appears as dust in the balance compared with the powers of his mind.

A learned French writer says: 'Dust here is a real calamity, a fiend-like persecutor that allows you not a moment's rest.

And then, all at once, there was a crash, a concussion that hit the ear like a blow, a geyser of smoke and dust and stones out on the flat in front of us.

Officers were galloping about yelling orders; over in the dust where the bomb had struck, a man was sawing furiously away at the throats of the oxen (there were seven of them, and there would be plenty of beef in camp that night at any rate); there was a dead horse, two badly wounded men and a hundred feet away a man lying on his face, hatless, just as he had been blown there: dead, or as good as dead.

Once, in a cloud of dust, we passed troops marching toward the fronttired faces, laughing faces the shout "Man in the road !"

and then the glimpse of a couple of Red Cross men kneeling by a soldier who had given out on the way; once, in the black pines, cows driven by two little frightened peasant children; once a long line of bearded Jews, bound, with packs on their backs, for what was left of their homes; a supply-train, a clanking battery, and now and then other motors like ours with shrouded gray figures, streaking by in a flashing mist of dust.

In The Dust Of The Russian Retreat Warsaw had fallen, and Ivangorod, and the centre of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, sweeping across eastern Europe like beaters across a prairie, was now before Brest-Litovsk.

This was war in the grand old stylean army on the march, literally, down roads smoky with dust and sunshine, across bridges their own pioneers had built, a river of men and horses, wagons and guns, from one hazy blue horizon to another.

The dust hung like fog in the autumn sunshine.

Round and through these wagon-trains, in a swirl of dust, rumbled and swayed big motor-trucks, and once or twice, scattering everything with a lilting "Ta-te...

Flowing back toward this huge, confident, onrushing organism, the peasants timid, halting, weary, and dust-covered, with wagons heaped with furniture, beds, hay for the horses, with the littlest children and those too old to walkwere returning to the charred ruins of their homes.

Babies scarcely big enough to sit up crammed their little fingers into their eyes to shut out the dust; bigger children, to whom the ride would be, no doubt, the event of their lives, laughed and clapped their hands, and old men on foot took off their caps, after the fashion of the country, and bowed gravely as we whirled past.

All the dust through which we had ridden since morning seemed to have gathered over that dismal wreck.

Through this dust we tried to find the headquarters of the Sixth Army Corps.

We had driven all day with nothing to eat but a bit of war bread and chocolate, we were black with dust, there was not a crumb in the place that did not belong to the army, and we sat there in the thickening dusk, almost as much adrift as a raft in mid-ocean, The two armieswagon-trains, that is to saywere crossing each other at that corner.

The Germans were going one way, the Austro-Hungarians the othertired, dust-covered horses and men, anonymous cogs in the vast machine, which had been following the man ahead since the day before, like enough, and might go on into another day before they could make camp.

Now the stream would stop as one line tried to break through the other, puzzled drivers would yank their horses back, then some determined section commander would come charging back, fling his horse into the tanglewagon tongues jammed into the canopy in front, protestations in German, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak, goodness knows what, until at last one line gave way and the other shot forward through the dust again.

They were the very peasants we had seen dragging through the dust of the Brest-Litovsk road and this the same country, though it looked so strangely bright and warm and full of people.

There is something so pitifully mean in the inverted Ambition of that Man who can hope for Annihilation, and please himself to think that his whole Fabrick shall one Day crumble into Dust, and mix with the Mass of inanimate Beings, that it equally deserves our Admiration and Pity.

Meanwhile the Caliphate of Cordova had reached the height of its power, while that of the Fatimites extended from the Nile to western Morocco, and the little Idrissite empire, pulverized under the weight of these expanding powers, became once more a dust of disintegrated tribes.

It was only in the eleventh century that the dust again conglomerated.

Into some determined spot the enemy was pouring a perfect rain of shot and shell, and the dust rising after each explosion formed a curtain that blotted out the rest of the landscape.

The result was that most of Aymon's foes bit the dust, while he rode away unharmed, and gathering many followers, he proceeded to win back all the castles and fortresses he had lost.