Explore "The Prisoner" by Marjorie Pickthall on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The car was hopelessly dislocated, that was evident; when Berry started the engine, it clucked like a dying hen for a few revolutions, and failed. He was minded to waste no more time on it. He stowed the contents of the tool-box mysteriously about his person, hid the spare can of petrol in the ditch, and departed to find his bearings, and, if possible, a warm barn to sleep in. Once he looked back at the car. "You look lorst, old girl," said Berry, "but you aint 'arf so lorst and lonesome as me."
There are degrees of lostness. Private Berry was lost in the superlative degree-utterly, hopelessly, intensively. It was one o'clock in the morning and cold. The moon was up, so round and white, it reminded him of a peeled onion but persistently in the wrong quarter of the sky. He sighed. He had with him a tin of those striped delicacies known as humbugs, and with these he stayed himself while proceeding to cross the very loneliest landscape he had ever seen in his life.