قراءة كتاب How the World Travels

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How the World Travels

How the World Travels

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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thing we should have seen would be a neat little cart loaded with vegetables or bright milk-cans, and harnessed to one or two large handsome dogs.

In England most dogs, except those owned by farmers or sportsmen, lead idle lives, but this is not the case on the Continent. The dogs of Belgium, Holland, and Germany are quite content to work—and to work hard, too—for their livings. There are numbers of them in the towns and villages, bravely dragging heavy loads, or lying down between the shafts and taking a well-earned nap in some shady corner of the cobbled street.


BELGIAN DOG-DRAWN CART.

In Belgium dogs were employed, not only for peaceful purposes, but in times of war for drawing ambulances, little ammunition wagons, and machine-guns.


SEDAN CHAIR, CONSTANTINOPLE.

Oxen are also used to draw carts in most of the European countries, and very picturesque some of them are. In Turkey most elaborate bullock carts are used in some districts as mourning carriages, and in them women are conveyed when they wish to visit the grave-yards. These carts are usually drawn by two animals which wear, fixed to their collars, large curved pieces of wood hung with tassels. The carts themselves are elaborately decorated, and while one man leads the bullocks another, staff in hand, walks at the side of the vehicle.


TURKISH MOURNING CAR.

There are many other strange conveyances to be seen in Turkey, perhaps the most curious of all being the sedan chairs which, although they have quite disappeared from other cities of Europe, are still used at night or on snowy days in the streets of Constantinople. In the eighteenth century sedan chairs were common in England, and in them the powdered and patched ladies went to their balls and routs, but it is strange to think of the quaint old-world conveyances being carried by stalwart Turkish porters along the dark, muddy streets of an Oriental city. These chairs, like the agricultural carts of Wales, come down to us from a past age, and another strange survival is seen at Schiessel, a village near Bremen, where the peasant girls drive to weddings and other festivities in large wagons that, painted and decorated with garlands of flowers, are exactly like the old carts and charettes of the Middle Ages.

Russia is a country where the carriages appear very strange to English eyes, for there three horses are driven abreast, and while the two outer animals gallop, the one in the centre is trained to trot. As may be imagined, a very skilful and experienced driver is necessary to guide these droskeys, as they are called, along the rough country roads or through the crowded streets of a city.

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