| |
|
The
country was wooded everywhere except at the bottom of the valley to the
northward, where there was a small meadow, through
which flowed a stream scarcely visible from the valley’s im.(12)
This open ground looked hardly larger than an ordinary backyard but was
really several acres in extent.(13)
Its green was more vivid than that of the enclosing
forest.(14)
Away beyond it rose a similar line of giant cliffs. The
valley, indeed, from this point of observation seemed entirely shut in,
and one could but have wondered how the road had found a way into it.(15)
No country is so wild(16)
and difficult but men will make it a theater of war; concealed in the forest
at the bottom of that military rattrap in which half a hundred men in
possession of (17)
the exits might have starved an army to submission, lay five regiments of
Federal infantry. They had marched all the previous day and night and were
resting. At nightfall they would take to the road
again, climb to the place where their unfaithful sentinel now slept, and
descending the other slope of the ridge, fall upon a camp in the rear of
it. (18)
In case of (19)failure,
their position would be perilous(20)
in the extreme; and fail they surely would, should
accident or vigilance apprise the enemy of the movement.
(21)
|
|
|
English
Intensive Reading 
Introduction
