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136 miles. But the meadow had disappeared! 'Twa'n't there!

The place it ought to be was there—the space, I mean—but everything that made a meadow had been rubbed out, and in its place another picture had been sketched in—hasty, with charcoal on a piece of brown butcher's paper—looked like from the color, or the lack of color. Supposed to be the picture of a city, I guessed. Queer-lookin' city. A child might have built it, with blocks cut all one size. The buildin's were all alike—long and low, like cars in a train-yard—about a million or so of them, seemed as if—with black roofs on 'em. And shootin' up into the sky out of the roofs were a whole lot of chimneys—high slim affairs, painted black. Made me think of the trunks of dead trees shootin' up out of some valley, where a long time ago, a forest fire had swept away all of the small timber.

I calculated the city (which of course, I guessed to be the soldiers' camp) lay about a half-a-mile away from the spot where Nellie and me were standin' and starin' with our eyes hangin' out on our cheeks. Anyhow, we were near enough to see some of the dirt-colored space, between the buildin's (there wasn't a scrap of meadow green left behind) and crawlin' 'round over the space, I could make out objects (dirt-colored,