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Stacks of pit-props stood ready for loading between the lines. "Seems a sound arrangement," Hilliard commented as they made their inspection. "Quite. Anything I noticed before struck me as being efficient." When they had seen all that the wharf appeared to offer, they walked round the end of the shed.
Some arch-bellboy or other potentate had mounted to the seat beside the driver. Madly we clattered over cobbled ways. Out on the smooth waters of the roadstead lay ships great and small, ships with stripped masts and smokeless funnels, others with faint gray spirals wreathing upward from their stacks.
"The stacks, sir?" cried Tom, pausing, glass in hand. "Well, not all at once, but the straw. They tell me it has been swept over the country for miles. I never remember such a storm here. I've seen them on the coast." "Why, the bar under the letters has bent right down, sir," said Tom, after a minute's examination. "I can't see whether it's broken."
"This is indeed good news." Farmer Lavender was almost as excited as his landlord, and declared that he would light a bonfire in the farm-yard, if he could be sure the stacks wouldn't get alight. "Nay, Joe, I wouldn't," said his prudent mother. "Thou can be as glad as thou wilt, and the Parliament 'll say nought to thee; but bonfires is bonfires, lad."
The governor, leaving a sufficient force to protect the village, returned with the remainder of the expedition to Manhattan. During the siege the loss of the Dutch was one man killed and five or six wounded. The Indians also succeeded, by means of burning arrows, in firing one dwelling house and several stacks of corn within the palisades.
He became open prey. His name was published abroad. Then his cattle were apt to disappear. His stacks of hay might catch fire unexpectedly at night. His house itself might be plundered, and, in not infrequent cases, the man himself was brutally murdered. It was part of a code no less binding because it was unwritten.
The corrals, the hay stacks all were gone. What could it mean? And then, slowly there filtered into Werper's consciousness an explanation of the havoc that had been wrought in that peaceful valley since last his eyes had rested upon it Achmet Zek had been there! Basuli and his warriors had noted the devastation the moment they had come in sight of the farm.
I might tell you about M. Nerincx's currency system; how he issued paper promises to pay when he gave employment to the idle in repairing those houses which permitted of being repaired, and cleaned the streets of debris, till ruined Louvain looked as shipshape as ruined Pompeii; and how he got a little real money from Brussels to stop depreciation when the storekeepers came to him and said that they had stacks of his notes which no mercantile concern would cash.
The fire, if successful, burns furiously for a few hours and then smoulders for some days, after which little of the timber remains but ashes and the charred stumps of the bigger trees. If the burning is very incomplete, it is necessary to make stacks of the lighter timbers that remain, and to fire these again. As soon as the ashes are cool, sowing begins.
Bouvard lost his head. His entire household gathered round him, all talking together, and he forbade them to knock down the stacks, begged of them to give him some help, called for water, and asked where were the firemen. "We've got to get them first!" exclaimed the mayor. "That's your fault!" replied Bouvard.
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