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There was a momentary pause. The room was full of the harsh babel of men's voices. The drinks were being distributed. Suddenly a voice spoke out above the rest. "Here's to the new manager! Good luck to him! Bill Warden, here's to you! Success and plenty of it!" Instantly the hubbub increased a hundredfold. Bill Warden swung round laughing to face the clamour, and the tension went out of Dot.
As each man in the town had been permitted to build his house according to his own fancy, picturesque irregularity was the agreeable result. It may be added that, as each man spoke his own language in his own tones, Babel and noise were the consequence.
It is a matter to be settled between me and my government, and as far as it affects my person is of no consequence now. You will destroy the compact." "Nine minutes!" said Mr. Grimm monotonously. Again the babel broke out. "Do we understand that you want to see the compact?" one of the cowled men asked suddenly of Mr. Grimm as he turned. "No, I don't want to see it. I'd prefer not to see it."
"Feed us first and then command us to be virtuous!" will be the words written upon the banner lifted against Thee a banner which shall destroy Thy Church to its very foundations, and in the place of Thy Temple shall raise once more the terrible Tower of Babel; and though its building be left unfinished, as was that of the first one, yet the fact will remain recorded that Thou couldst, but wouldst not, prevent the attempt to build that new tower by accepting the offer, and thus saving mankind a millennium of useless suffering on earth.
The thronging pavements were a kaleidoscope of the East long-coated Persians; small, brown, slant-eyed Japanese; big, yellow, slant-eyed Chinamen; a naked Coringhi, his dark body shining in the lamp-light, and the rings in his nose jingling together; Hindus of all ranks, from the stately Brahmin to the coolie bearing loads or pulling a rickshaw; Burmese; and, to Jack's pleasant surprise, three straight-stepping English soldiers, swinging along with their little canes, their lively talk sounding pleasantly familiar amid the babel of Eastern tongues.
They said that hitherto all men had used the same language, but that at this time there was sent on them a confusion of many tongues, from which confusion the tower was named Babel. In Greece, there was a legend in which we trace the story of the tower of Babel.
Modern ethnology, emancipated from a belief in an immediate consanguinity of mankind, by the spread of less infantile views about Noah's Ark, goes on to question the sufficiency of language as a bond of union, and forthwith stumbles over the Tower of Babel. Two contemporary lines of discovery have tended to determine the result.
Furnival, with many others indeed, with most of those who were so far advanced in the world as to be making bread by their profession was of opinion that all this palaver that was going on in the various tongues of Babel would end as it began in words. "Vox et præterea nihil." To practical Englishmen most of these international congresses seem to arrive at nothing else.
The builders of the tower of Babel itself could not have produced such a jargon or variety of tongues, Guy thought, as he picked his way onward, new stopping to gaze at some odd-looking group, and now attracted by the harsh music and beating drums of a band of native musicians.
But the Regular Army fellow had not the heart to suggest the demolition of our Towers of Babel, and the foundations remain to this day to attest the genius of the American volunteer soldiery.
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