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It's easy enough to reach," I assured him. He was extraordinarily clumsy on the slates, but obeyed my instructions like a child. I wrenched at the wooden louvers. "Got a knife?" I asked. He produced one an ugly-looking weapon, but clean. By good luck, we did not need it; for as he passed it to me, the louver at which I was tugging broke and came away in my hand.
Slates cracked underfoot, flung down from the roofs by the wind, and the jackdaws croaked in answer to each other across the silent park. Durtal came out on a terrace overlooking the city, and he rested his elbows on a parapet of grey time-eaten stone, as dry as pumice and patterned with orange and sulphur-coloured lichens.
A band of cement, in which no stones were allowed to show, surrounded each window with a sort of frame, where time had made some slight, capricious cracks, such as appear on plastered ceilings. The outer blinds, of a clumsy pattern, were noticeable for their color, which was dragon-green. A few mosses grew among the slates of the roof.
Between the path at this point and the cliff's edge lay a small patch cleared for potatoes, and here an oldish man was leaning on his shovel and looking up at Zeb. "Good-mornin', my son!" "Mornin', hollibubber!" The old man had once worked inland at St. Teath slate-quarries, and made his living as a "hollibubber," or one who carts away the refuse slates.
I asked him if he did not feel, as an artist, that a solid but yielding substance like cheese went naturally with a solid, yielding substance like bread; to eat it off biscuits is like eating it off slates. I asked him if, when he said his prayers, he was so supercilious as to pray for his daily biscuits. He gave me generally to understand that he was only obeying a custom of Modern Society.
There were large and small, fair and dark lads among them, but not one with whom he could not have coped. To this point his scrutiny was first directed. At last he turned his attention to the game. Many of the stones, that had been thrown, struck the slates on the roof; not one had passed over the church.
Large sections of the walls in the church are shelved and divided into pigeon holes, each containing a skull! The bones "are worked into the walls in a species of sepulchral mosaic." These bones, it is said, had been in their graves about 400 years. The old pictures of the apostles are painted upon slates, one of them bearing the date 1224.
Not one of the would-be scholars had a book of any kind; those who said they wanted to learn to write had no paper and no slates. Had they anything they could recite from memory? A little girl forthwith began, Now I lay me down to sleep. With great patience, Archie taught them the first verse of the 23rd psalm, and, trying if they could sing it, found there were several good voices.
Again, oil paintings have been secured on the slates, after small dabs of oil paint of various colors have been placed on the inside surface of the slates, a little linseed oil being poured on each. Fraudulent Slate Writing.
Fifty years ago party nominations were generally made in conventions a system typified in the public imagination by a little group in a smoke-filled room who made out the party slates. The direct primary was invented to make the nominating process a more democratic one to give the party voters themselves a chance to pick their party candidates.
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