United States or Lebanon ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"They unloaded the boxes from the train and begun to knock the tops off. From the first one that was open I saw General De Vega take the Winchester rifles and pass them around to a squad of morbid soldiery. The other boxes was opened next, and, believe me or not, divil another gun was to be seen. Every other box in the load was full of pickaxes and spades.
The Jenny Jones ran for her port. She had just slowed down, and the great waves of smoke from the town were pouring over her, when two large boats, heavily laden with men, came off to her. The men swarmed up the side, and the officer in command shouted, "Bring up the pickaxes, and go to work!"
The smith and his mates, with such hands as he required, had put up a forge, and he and the carpenters had been busily engaged manufacturing pickaxes and spades. With such as had been finished the men were the next day set to work on the trenches, some being employed in cutting down trees to serve for the woodwork which was required.
The reason for this, Jim discovered, was that there were not sufficient implements at Sorata to supply the new labourers, so the prisoners were compelled to carry with them the tools wherewith they were to do their work when they reached their destination. "Carrajo!" exclaimed Douglas under his breath, as he watched his fellow-prisoners shoulder the pickaxes and shovels.
I was ashamed of crying in my coffin, but I couldn't bear it any longer. I thought I was quite disgraced, for everybody was expected to be perfectly quiet and patient down there. But the moment I began to cry, I heard a sound. And when I listened it was the sound of spades and pickaxes. It went on and on, and came nearer and nearer.
There were rafters from the torn-down floor above, lying loose on the ground but they were too light. A beam ran across over our heads, but not out of reach of our arms and our pickaxes a beam fast at each end in the ruined wall, with ceiling and flooring all ripped away, and a great gap in the roof above, open to the sky. We attacked the beam at both ends at once.
The trail led us over the glacial fringe for a quarter of a mile, and the going was fairly easy, but, after leaving the land ice-foot, the trail plunged into ice so rough that we had to use pickaxes to make a pathway. It took only about one mile of such going, and my sledge split. "Number one," said I to myself, and I came to a halt.
These two things, the advent of a new dancer at the Opera, and the fame of Paul Zouche, were the chief topics of 'Society' outside its own tawdry personal concern; but under all the light froth and spume of the pleasure-seeking, pleasure-loving whirl of fashion, a fierce tempest was rising, and the first whistlings of the wind of revolt were already beginning to pierce through the keyholes and crannies of the stately building allotted to the business of Government; so much so indeed that one terrible night, all unexpectedly, a huge mob, some twenty thousand strong, surrounded it, armed with every conceivable weapon from muskets to pickaxes, and shouted with horrid din for 'Bread and Justice! these being considered co-equal in the bewildered mind of the excited multitude.
Some had pickaxes and crowbars to break the rocks, others had implements to construct bridges over the mountain-torrents, while it was the duty of others to lay stepping-stones in the smaller streams. As the country was inhabited by fierce Moorish mountaineers, Don Diego de Castrillo was despatched with a body of horse and foot to take possession of the heights and passes.
Luckily it was not a hurricane which affected Mrs. Otway or her good old Anna at all directly, but it upset them both, in their several ways, very much indeed, for it took the extraordinary shape of a violent attack by a mob armed with pickaxes and crowbars on certain so-called Germans for they were all naturalised and their property.
Word Of The Day