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Little by little it deepened to a hoarse roar, as the host surged on, chanting the pious invocations that so often had struck terror into the Egyptians. Now they heard the threatening din with hearts unmoved; nay, with spirits longing for revenge for untold wrongs and insults.

Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who would be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy of 'don't care' on a question about which all true men do care; such as Union appeals to beseech all true Union men to yield to Disunionists; reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous, to repentance; such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did.

Religious invocations have for this people the nature of magical formulæ, the slightest change in which destroys their efficacy. The Russian clings to the heathen feeling, though he hides it under a Christian veil. He believes in the power of particular words and gestures.

The Señor must not be alarmed, she added, folding Arithelli's blue habit with wrinkled, careful hands. True, Barcelona was an evil place for one so young as "La Nina," but the blessed saints Emile gave her a peseta, and left her to her invocations. In the long passage that led from the dressing-rooms he ran into Estelle, who was just sufficiently drunk to be excitable and quarrelsome.

So he brought out the letter and straightway there came up to him a company of guards, who took it from him and carried it to the King; and Kafid read it and wrote a reply to this purport: 'After the usual invocations, We let King Teghmus know that we mean to take our blood-revenge on thee and wash out our stain and waste thy reign and rend the curtain in twain and slay the old men and enslave the young men.

It was too late then to remove his family, and, indeed, where could he have run to with the portly Signora Teresa and two little girls on that great plain? So, barricading every opening, the old man sat down sternly in the middle of the darkened cafe with an old shot-gun on his knees. His wife sat on another chair by his side, muttering pious invocations to all the saints of the calendar.

But he only thought of her pious invocations for his safety; he only remembered that it was she who had given a holy grave to the only woman he could ever love; and, full of gratitude, as a pilgrim would approach a saint, he drew near to her.

She could not see them, she could not hear them, yet she knew that they were there and was able to count their number thirty and two in all while within herself rose a picture of them, each differing from the other, but all white, expectant, solemn. Now Tua heard Asti murmuring secret invocations that she did not understand.

Each man had two spears bound with a thong to draw them back after the cast, with a shield to ward off blows, and a broad-bladed sword of bronze for close combat. With war-chants and invocations the two hosts met. The spears, well poised and leveled, clove the air, hissing between them, and under the weight of the spear-heads and their sharp points many in both hosts fell.

The need of tenderness which seizes us at dusk, when the evening mist begins to roll in from the hills, and when all the perfumes of the earth intoxicate us, is but imperfectly satisfied by lyric invocations.