United States or Cook Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The street was very narrow, and paved with flag-stones not quite so smooth as those of Florence; the houses are tall enough to be stately, if they were not so inconceivably dingy and shabby; but, with their half-dozen stories, they make only the impression of hovel piled upon hovel, squalor immortalized in undecaying stone.

He had arrived about midway towards the lower end, from which his course began, when he overheard the approach of some one who struck down a cane on the flag-stones at every step, uttering at regular intervals, two sepulchral hems. "Mercy on us!" quoth Robin, recognizing the sound.

And the invisible spirits, thus disputing, sported through the air, mounting, descending, whirling around like atoms of dust in a sunbeam, from the flag-stones of the floor to the rafters of the roof. Inside the furnace, in the crucible, some other thing responded, but it could not be well heard, as the crucible had been hermetically sealed.

The morning broke dank and drear, for the December air had chilled the moisture into a fog. The wide verandas that opened on the court-yard in rear were dripping with the rain, and the broad flag-stones covered with a greasy slime. The diminutive grass-plot was brown and soggy, but the withered blades rapidly disappeared under the sturdy plunges of Marcel's spade.

Before the important works, undertaken in 1833, the subterranean drain of Paris was subject to these sudden slides. The water filtered into certain subjacent strata, which were particularly friable; the foot-way, which was of flag-stones, as in the ancient sewers, or of cement on concrete, as in the new galleries, having no longer an underpinning, gave way.

Here and there on the flag-stones huge lions were couched like sphinxes, living symbols of the devouring sun. They were slumbering with half-closed eyelids.

At the same hours he would raise the great hangings of the same swinging doors; would remain with his arms outspread in the same attitude; or prayed prostrate on the same flag-stones, while around him a people of priests moved barefooted through the passages filled with an eternal twilight. But Salammbo was in the barrenness of his life like a flower in the cleft of a sepulchre.

G. Pieseitto, informing Council that having recessed her new brick building in Berresford street at least two feet, so as to dedicate it to the use of the citizens of Charleston, if they will pave with flag-stones the front of her lot, respectfully requests, that if accepted, the work may be done as soon as possible. Referred to the Aldermen, Ward No. 4."

About the same time, the streets of London themselves were little better, the kennel being still permitted to flow in the middle of the road, which was paved with round stones, flag-stones for the convenience of pedestrians being as yet unknown.

Banishment, death, the ergastulum, torture and, what is much worse, the insults the brute heaps on any one he turns against I am too wise to give that " he spat on the flag-stones "for the friendship of Commodus. And Commodus is Rome; you can't persuade me he isn't. Rome turns on its favorites as he does scorns them, insults them, throws them on dung-heaps. That for Rome!" He spat again.