United States or Ukraine ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And the people came in tens, and fifties, and hundreds, men, women, and children; and they stood waiting in front of the Palace steps till Gessler the Governor should come out and say something very important and special to them. And punctually at eleven o'clock, Gessler, having finished a capital breakfast, came out on to the top step and spoke to them. "Ladies and gentlemen," he began.
And drum and trumpet breaking forth, a division moved down in column of fifties. Slowly at first, but solidly, and with a vast stateliness it moved. So at Pharsalia marched the legion Caesar loved so in decision of heady fights strode the Old Guard of the world's last Conqueror.
They reasoned that if a man like Handy could succeed, why could not they also turn the trick? Could they not even improve on his tactics? Of course they could! Were they not, they argued, better actors and had they not more experience as managers? Of course they were, and had! Where Handy had made twenties and fifties, might not they pick up hundreds?
There were people still alive in the 'fifties and 'sixties who remembered the Napoleonic wars and the shadow cast by that giant figure upon the world; indeed, so slowly did thought move down in the far West that it might almost have been said that St. Renny was just beginning to realise the wars, and rather resented the fact that English and French had since fought side by side in the Crimea.
Many northerners had cast their first ballot in the fifties, with all the zeal of crusaders; they looked back upon the beginnings of Republicanism as they might have remembered the origin of a sacred faith; they thought of their party as the body which had abolished slavery and restored the Union; and they treasured the names of its Lincoln, its Seward, its Sumner and Grant and Sherman.
For these ordered fifties at their Christ-provided meal are for us a prophecy of the day that shall surely dawn, when all the hunger of wandering prodigals is over, and the deceived heart of the idol-worshipper no longer drawing him aside to feed on ashes, they shall come from the East and from the West, and from the North and from the South, and sit at the feast which the Lord hath prepared for all nations, and when all the earth shall be satisfied with the goodness of His house, even of His holy temple.
Italy, still arrogant over her florid successes of the fifties, had nothing but ridicule for the robust northern style which, to the ears accustomed to simple melody, accompanied by the tum-ti-tum of guitar-notes, that lightest dessert of the musical feast, was as the howling of demons drowning the songs of an angel-choir.
The pick of the mason has brought down the proud gateway which its imperial builder fondly imagined was to last for ages. The Tuileries preceded it into oblivion. The Alpha and Omega of that gorgeous pageant of the fifties vanished like a mirage! It is not here alone one finds Paris changing. A railway is being brought along the quais with its depot at the Invalides.
As for the trifles in your hands, gentlemen, you are not to suppose that men who are trained to look in at one end of a thirty-two pounder, loaded with grape, while the match is put to the other, will so much as wink at their report, though you fired them by fifties. What say you, boys, is a pistol a weapon to repel boarders?"
How the town used to flock to Telegraph Hill on a Sunday in the olden time! They were mostly quiet folk who went there, and they went to feast their eyes upon one of the loveliest of landscapes or waterscapes. They probably took their lunch with them, and their families if they had them; though families were infrequent in the Fifties.
Word Of The Day