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As he spoke the head disappeared, and they heard him go clumping down the ladder again. The words fell heavily on Lilac's ears. "Best as it wur afore." Perhaps everyone would think so too. She looked dismally first at the locks of hair on the ground and then at Agnetta's unconcerned face. "Well, you've no call to mind what he says anyhow," said the latter cheerfully. "He don't know what's what."

The clumping staff of my heavy crucifix drew hollow echoes from the flagstones. In the deep sort of cave behind us, lit by a dim lanthorn, the negroes waited to unbar the doors. Castro himself began to mutter over his beads. Suddenly he said: "It is the last time I shall stand here. Now, there is not any more a place for me on the earth."

There was nothing of mirth in the woman's drawn face. "Oh, Ernie, f'r God's sake! What they goin' to do to you!" He was half way up the narrow stairway, she at the foot of it, peering up at him. "They won't do anything. I guess old Hatton ain't so stuck on havin' his swell golf club crowd know his little boy was beat up by one of the workmen." He was clumping about upstairs now.

It is not every clown with his clumping dirty shoes that is admitted into kings' privy-chambers and private palaces; neither doth, or will God, at the day of New Jerusalem, suffer any to trace about this golden street, but such as have golden feet, and that beautified with goodly shoes.

Well-to-do bourgeois, shot with frayed nerves, exhausted by an excess of emotion and fatigue, searched for lodgings, anywhere and at any price, jostled by armies of peasants, shaggy-haired, in clumping sabots, with bundles on their backs, who were wandering on the same quest for the sake of the women and children dragging wearily in their wake.

Instinctively it bore a suggestion of home and of quiet and of peace; like a kitten with drowsy eyes purring to itself in the sunshine. A moment the visitor stood silent, listening; then, his heavy shoes clumping on the uncarpeted floor, he moved toward it. Instantly the song ceased, but he kept on, pushed open the door gently, stepped inside.

The men had finished their hasty meal, in hasty miner's fashion, silently, and tramped, with clumping feet, out of the mess-house to the shade of its northern side before Bill had ended his painful repast. Whiffs of tobacco smoke and voices came through the open windows, where the miners lounged and rested on a long bench while waiting for the whistle.

Panting, all but fainting, Dick was over the enemy's goal line and he had the ball down. When Dave had emerged from that fruitless clumping he had a broad grin on his face. He saw that while Dick was not yet over the goal line, only the fullback was in the way and the fullback was no match for Dick in the matter of speed. Then the yells told the rest. Back came the ball.

"Bet yer life!" was the emphatic answer as he lumbered away on great clumping shoes, true knight as any that used to ride away on a horse just as clumsily arrayed in armor, and perhaps that romantic rider was no better equipped in mind or heart than this glass-blower of the nineteenth century.

But a hospital ward is no place in which to go clumping about in footgear designed to stand hard wear and tear on the high-roads; and my army boots, after two years, have not yet needed re-soling. I wore them, it is true, during my period of service with the Chain Gang, as a squad of outdoor orderlies, engaged in road-making, was locally called.