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Then the squires carried in beautiful white swans on silver platters, and roasted cranes and curlews on plates that glowed like the sun. After that came rabbits stewed in sweet sauce, and hams and curries. The last course consisted of tarts and preserves, dates and figs and pomegranates. The supper began about five o'clock, and the guests ate and drank into the night.

They have the forms of blessed isles and the forms of blessing angels; they are like threatening hands, fluttering sails, a flight of cranes. They float between God's heaven and the poor earth as fair symbols of all human longings, akin to both dreams of the earth, in which her sullied soul flies to the embrace of the pure heaven.

Away, away; splash, splash, through the coolées, around the maraises, clouds of wild fowl that there is no time to shoot into rising now on this side, now on that; snipe without number, gray as the sky, with flashes of white, trilling petulantly as they flee; giant snowy cranes lifting and floating away on waving pinions, and myriads of ducks in great eruptions of hurtling, whistling wings.

A little ahead appeared a sand-bank, on which stood a number of tall-legged birds, cormorants, white cranes, and other waders, large and small. We might land on the island, and save our lives; but the wind setting directly on it, we might lose our canoe, or, at all events, the water would break into her and destroy our goods.

I had elephants, lions, antelopes, horses, cattle, sheep, stags, goats, storks, cranes, even fish embroidered on my outer garments amid trees, vines, and flowers; roses, lilies, violets, poppies and others uncountable. I spent on such gewgaws a considerable part of my allowance, yet never exhausted Falco's lavish provision for me.

It seemed the rendezvous for the many species of wild winged creatures that people the great marais of Louisiana. There were the egrets, the ibises both white and scarlet the various species of Ardeidae, the cranes, and the red flamingoes.

Long ago he had forgotten his 'grammatical' learning except, of course, a few important matters known to all educated men, such as the fact that the alphabet was invented by Mercury, who designed the letters from figures made in their flight by the cranes of Strymon.

He could tell that too by the birds beginning their pleasant evening twittering, that was soft and sparkling like the rays of the sun. Far inland above the stone-quarry, where the cranes stood out against the sky, a cloud of smoke rose every now and then into the air, and burst in a fountain of pieces of rock. Long after came the explosion, bit by bit in a series of rattling reverberations.

Take, of a thousand crowding instances, that great passage in the Iliad where the Greek host, disembarking on the plains of the Scamander, is likened to a migrating flock of cranes or geese or long-necked swans, as they fly proudly over the Asian meadows and alight screaming by Cayster's stream and Virgil echoes more than once the familiar lines. The crane was a well-known bird.

Eight months later, docks a mile long had been constructed, concrete platforms and electric cranes set up; within a year fourteen ships could be unloaded simultaneously, the rate of speed being determined only by the number of stevedores. For unloading purposes regiments of negroes were stationed at each port.