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In Huymonde there was wailing enough that night; ruin and loss, and a broadcasting of lifelong sentences of penury. One fell to the Burgomaster's lot; and had she still aught against him but she had not the score was paid. And many prayed, and a few, when morning came, and showed their roofs still standing, gave thanks.
Two meeting-houses stood on two eminences, facing each other, and looking like a couple of fighting-cocks with their necks straight up in the air, as if they would flap their roofs, the next thing, and crow out of their upstretched steeples, and peck at each other's glass eyes with their sharp-pointed weathercocks. The first was a good pattern of the real old-fashioned New England meeting-house.
Scarcely had he arrived, when the sentinels on the towers shouted that masses of men were approaching, by all the streets leading to the palace; and immediately afterwards the terraces and flat roofs of the houses near were darkened by throngs of natives, shouting and brandishing their weapons.
Across the narrow streets the gay lanterns of paper flutter like large butterflies. When the wind blows over the roofs they rise and fall as painted bubbles do. In front of their booths sit the merchants on silken carpets. They have straight black beards, and their turbans are covered with golden sequins, and long strings of amber and carved peach-stones glide through their cool fingers.
"What's that got to do with it? ... The roofs of the native huts scattering in the wind! ... the absolute agony of the twisting palms!.... and those two beggars laughing as they breasted death! Girl, you've gone and done it!" He leaned down and caught her by the hand, and then raced with her to the bungalow.
At her left, some fifty feet below, running in the shape of a fan, round a belt of green, were the roofs of Northwood black brick unrelieved except by the yellow chimney-pots, specks of colour upon a line of soft cotton-like clouds melting into grey, the grey passing into blue, and the blue spaces widening.
The roofs and doors would or would not hold, and, in the latter case, until the force of the storm abated no help could serve them. The storm showed no signs of abatement. The black sky was the sky of an unlit night. There was no lightening in any direction, and the blinding flashes amidst the din of thunder only helped to further intensify the pitchy vault.
Three of them were small, and the fourth was large. They might have been built yesterday, for all that he could see of ruin or decay. The doors and windows of the larger cabin and two of the smaller ones were closed. The roofs were unbroken. The walls appeared solid.
He thought, as he glanced out into the moonlight on the high-gabled silvery roofs around and on the gardens of the convents and the towers of the quaint city, that the scene wanted nothing of the proper charm of Spanish humor and romance, and he was as grateful to those poor souls as if they had meant him a favor.
The house was close to the road apparently an old farmstead turning blank dark walls and roofs to them, so that it was evidently uninhabited or else inhabited only at the other side. The young woman looked up at it, apparently not without distrust, but even to her keen scrutiny there was no sign of life.
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