United States or Greece ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
For a fortnight London had almost lived upon horse-flesh. In the poorer quarters there was not a dog to be seen, and a sewer rat was considered a delicacy. Eight million mouths had made short work of even the vast supplies that had been hurriedly poured into the city as soon as the invasion had become a certainty, and absolute starvation was now a matter of a few days at the outside.
The coachman declared that, on the 6th of June, in obedience to the commands of a police-agent, he had stood from three o'clock in the afternoon until nightfall on the Quai des Champs-Elysees, above the outlet of the Grand Sewer; that, towards nine o'clock in the evening, the grating of the sewer, which abuts on the bank of the river, had opened; that a man had emerged therefrom, bearing on his shoulders another man, who seemed to be dead; that the agent, who was on the watch at that point, had arrested the living man and had seized the dead man; that, at the order of the police-agent, he, the coachman, had taken "all those folks" into his carriage; that they had first driven to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; that they had there deposited the dead man; that the dead man was Monsieur Marius, and that he, the coachman, recognized him perfectly, although he was alive "this time"; that afterwards, they had entered the vehicle again, that he had whipped up his horses; a few paces from the gate of the Archives, they had called to him to halt; that there, in the street, they had paid him and left him, and that the police-agent had led the other man away; that he knew nothing more; that the night had been very dark.
Hence the necessity of regularly flushing the sewer with water, which removes from the sides the substances that have attached themselves thereto, and which, without such precaution, soon decompose. In a word, it is necessary that a perfect washing shall be assured, and this can be done only by heavy rains or by strong currents of water.
"I will drop it in some ash-can or down some sewer on the way to the office," she said to herself. She slipped it into her muff and hurried away. But on the way to the cable-car no ash-can presented itself. True, she discovered the opening of a sewer on the corner where she took her car.
At last, I fancied that 'my princess must, in all probability, be in the governor's house, and nowhere else. I went round and inspected the governor's house, to the intent that should I discover any passage I might enter it. After a thousand toils, I broke the grating, and entered the chor-mahall through the sewer.
The only thing we have got in America that compares with the Tower of London and its associates is the Leutgert sausage factory in Chicago, where Leutgert got his wife into the factory, murdered her, and is alleged to have cut her up in pieces and made sausage of the meat, given the pieces with gristle in to his dogs, boiled the bones until they would run into the sewer, dissolved the remnants in concentrated lye, and sold the sausage to the lumber Jacks in the pine woods.
The cheerful motto of the oysterman is, "The muddier the water the fatter the oyster." And nowhere do the bivalves plump up more quickly than near the mouth of a sewer. The last method of transmission is by direct contact with the sick.
Hard, gray, cast polymer walls very plain. Ditto floor and ceiling. Single glow-plate overhead. Rough, gray bedclothing. Someone had found him after that careening flight from the terror of the sewer and had brought him here. Who? Who? The sense of well-being he had felt upon awakening had long since deserted him. What he felt now was a queer mixture of disgust and fear.
At the ordinary hour of breakfast, it was introduced by the steward with his usual forms, who, as soon as it was placed on the board in the inner apartment, said to Roland Graeme, with a glance of sarcastic import, "I leave you, my young sir, to do the office of sewer it has been too long rendered to the Lady Mary by one belonging to the house of Douglas."
I begged him to get rid of the idea that the sale of the materials would yield any profit, all the receipts would go in gifts and pillage, I said; and also that it was not these petty objects he ought to regard, but that he should consider how many millions had been buried in this ancient sewer, to transform it into a fairy palace, unique as to form in all Europe unique by the beauty of its fountains, unique also by the reputation that the deceased King had given to it; and that it was an object of curiosity to strangers of every rank who came to France; that its destruction would resound throughout Europe with censure; that these mean reasons of petty economy would not prevent all France from being indignant at seeing so distinguished an ornament swept away; that although neither he nor I might be very delicate upon what had been the taste and the favourite work of the late King, the Regent ought to avoid wounding his memory, which by such a long reign, so many brilliant years, so many grand reverses so heroically sustained, and escaped from in so unhoped-for a manner had left the entire world in veneration of his person: in fine, that he might reckon all the discontented, all the neutral even, would join in chorus with the Ancient Court, and cry murder; that the Duc du Maine, Madame de Ventadour, the Marechal de Villeroy would not hesitate to look upon the destruction of Marly as a crime against the King, a crime they would not fail to make the best of for their own purposes during all the regency, and even after it was at an end.
Word Of The Day