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His eyes were dreamily watching the smoke from a distant funnel over the roof-tops in line with his desk. "You were!" said Jimmie, watching his employer with rapt admiration. He had no higher ambition than to look like Warren Reyburn and have an office of his own.

My mark is Petrucci." "And the priest," said Champernoun. The crowd in the Rue de Bethisy was thinning, as bands of soldiers, each with its tail of rabble, moved off to draw other coverts. There was fighting still in many houses, and on the roof-tops as the pale dawn spread could be seen the hunt for fugitives.

There was a rapid dashing beneath the great walls; a sudden night of darkness as we plunged through an open archway into a narrow village street; a confused impression of houses built into side-walls; of machicolated gateways; of rocks and roof-tops tumbling about our ears; and within the street was sounding the babel of a shrieking troop of men and women.

This very isolation resulted in its being one of the few monuments spared from the furies of the Revolution, and, "half-palace and half-château," it glistens with the purity of its former glory, as picturesque as ever, with turrets, spires, and roof-tops all mellowed with the ages in a most entrancing manner.

Alas and alas! no! a cry of joy, a "Thank Heaven!" and the women force their way through the men to come round the child and the mother. All is gone save that skeleton ruin. But the ruin is seen from above. O Art! study life from the roof-tops! I was again foiled in seeing Trevanion.

No explosion followed, but the most astonishing thing happened. All at once, without any preliminary disturbance, the ground became white. A perfect silence fell on the Haram and the city for perhaps half a mile on all sides of the sacred enclosure Haram and streets, roof-tops, squares all looked as if suddenly covered with deep snow.

Even Moorish children, whose taste for destruction and slaughter is as highly developed as any European's, will pick up a young stork that has fallen from its nest and return it to the mother bird if they can. Storks sit at peace among the women of the hareem who come for their afternoon airing to the flat roof-tops of Moorish houses.

Such were the gloomy questions that I by repute, the sternest advocate of common-sense against fantastic errors; by profession, the searcher into flesh and blood, and tissue and nerve and sinew, for the causes of all that disease the mechanism of the universal human frame; I, self-boasting physician, sceptic, philosopher, materialist revolved, not amidst gloomy pines, under grim winter skies, but as I paced slow through laughing meadows, and by the banks of merry streams, in the ripeness of the golden August: the hum of insects in the fragrant grass, the flutter of birds amid the delicate green of boughs checkered by playful sunbeams and gentle shadows, and ever in sight of the resorts of busy workday man, walls, roof-tops, church-spires rising high; there, white and modern, the handwriting of our race, in this practical nineteenth century, on its square plain masonry and Doric shafts, the Town-Hall, central in the animated marketplace.

It was true that he was no longer young enough or handsome enough to seduce an honest girl. Nor did he now possess the skill and the agility requisite for an escape from prison, or for gymnastic feats upon the roof-tops. But in spite of his age, he was cleverer than anyone else! Once back in Venice, he could do anything he pleased. The first step, the essential step, was to get back.

A fire was hardly needed, except to dispel the dampness that had even made its insistent way indoors, covering walls and furniture with a clammy film. Outside, the moisture was dripping from the glistening magnolia leaves and from the pointed polished leaves of the live-oaks, and the sun that had come out with intense suddenness was drawing it steaming from the shingled roof-tops.