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"D n!" yelled out Jos, wild with fear, rage, and mortification; and Isidor came in at this juncture, swearing in his turn. "Pas de chevaux, sacre bleu!" hissed out the furious domestic. All the horses were gone. Jos was not the only man in Brussels seized with panic that day.
Little show of good feeling existed now between Napoleon's special envoy and the quartier-general. Indeed, the lack of harmony was spreading to officers of lesser rank. Severe criticism was indulged in on both sides. Never was the cynical old French saying so fully borne out by fact: "Quand il n'y a pas de foin au ratelier, les chevaux se battent."
Rosalie knew her mother well enough to be sure that if she had thought young Monsieur de Soulas nice, she would have drawn down on herself a smart reproof. Thus, to all her mother's incitement she replied merely by such phrases as are wrongly called Jesuitical wrongly, because the Jesuits were strong, and such reservations are the chevaux de frise behind which weakness takes refuge.
It is formed in the castellated style, of a handsome octagonal tower, of very white, shelly limestone, with a square turreted stone enclosure, on the top of which is an iron chevaux de frize, and which enclosure is subdivided into separate day-yards for prisoners.
This modified form of gambling is especially dangerous to the young. Parents, who on no account would let their children toss a five-franc piece on to the tables of Monte Carlo, see no harm in watching them play at petits chevaux. They should, first of all, make a certain ghastly pilgrimage I will now relate.
I can quite imagine a couple of Czech householders, law-abiding and good church-goers, conspiring to get away from the family for a bit and take a trip to Rügen, just for a flutter with the old gods. What with the secrecy required, as both Ruler and Church forbade the practice of worshipping Slavonic deities, the practice must have been quite as exciting as petits chevaux.
As the sharply pointed needles diverge a little, and as several leaves are drawn into the same burrow, each tuft forms a perfect chevaux de frise. On two occasions many of these tufts were pulled up in the evening, but by the following morning fresh leaves had been pulled in, and the burrows were again well protected.
I noticed an interesting custom at a Bhoi village in Nongpoh of barricading the path leading to the village from the forest with bamboo palisading and bamboo chevaux de frise to keep out the demon of cholera. In the middle of the barricade there was a wooden door over which was nailed the skull of a monkey which had been sacrificed to this demon, which is, as amongst the Syntengs, called khlam.
She watched him half in fear. This time he staked on twenty-nine, with the maximum en plein and all the carrés and chevaux. Again the few moments of suspense, the click of the ball, the croupier's voice. "Vingt-neuf, noir, impair et passe!" She clutched at his arm. "Henry!" she gasped. He laughed. "Open your bag," he directed. "We'll soon fill it." He left his stake untouched.
The silence yet held over the field; the westering sun glowed dull red behind the smoke; the three figures rested still by the cross-roads; the mass of frowning metal topped Malvern Hill like a giant, smoke-wreathed chevaux de frise. Out of the brushwood to the left of the regiment, straight by it, upward towards the guns, and then at a tangent off through the fields to the woods, sped a rabbit.