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The boys with one accord looked away from old Pierre to the red church on the hill, with the gold cross flaming on its steeple. Mass was at eleven. While the church was filling, Emil Bergson waited outside, watching the wagons and buggies drive up the hill. After the bell began to ring, he saw Frank Shabata ride up on horseback and tie his horse to the hitch-bar. Marie, then, was not coming.

"The proclamation to the army," says he, "is full of energy: it could not fail to make all military imaginations vibrate. That prophetic phrase, 'The eagle, with the national colours, will fly from church steeple to church steeple, till it settles on the towers of Notre Dame, was happy in the extreme."

What is it?” inquired Bawly. “You can’t jump over the church steeple.” “I believe I can!” exclaimed Bawly, before he thought. You see he didn’t like the fox to think he couldn’t do it, for Bawly was proud, and that’s not exactly right, and it got him into trouble, as you shall soon see.

John strained his eyes, and I did the same. Two hours passed, and the welcome moment arrived. 'I see it! exclaimed John 'Land oh! Land oh! In a frenzy of joy he had well-nigh upset the barge and spilled us out. Then he pointed his finger to an object in the distance that seemed like a lonely steeple holding watch over midnight.

'Oho! cried Barnaby, glancing over his shoulder, 'He's a merry fellow, that shadow, and keeps close to me, though I AM silly. We have such pranks, such walks, such runs, such gambols on the grass! Sometimes he'll be half as tall as a church steeple, and sometimes no bigger than a dwarf.

The Palace stood in the shade of that steeple, the real Palace, where the King sat deciding over the fate of his new subjects, taking their lands from them, when he did not take their lives, and banishing them across the sea to live and die in beggary. Her fingers tapped the glass in desperation as she realized her helplessness even to get news of his judgments.

But, when he closed his eyes he, above all else, conjured up, with rapturous pride, a vision of the facade and steeple; down below, the three portals, the roofs of the two lateral ones forming terraces, while from the central one, in the very middle of the facade, the steeple boldly sprang. Here again columns resting on piers supported archivaults with simple mouldings.

So he listened carefully, and the blue flower rang her tinkling bell louder than ever, and the rabbit could tell by the sound of it just which way to go, and pretty soon he was out of the woods and right beside the flower that was swinging to and fro in the wind, just like a bell in a church steeple. "Oh, I'm go glad I could ring and tell you the way back here," said the bluebell.

The steeple of Sartrouville loomed up above the red roofs of the houses and the poplars which fringe the bank of the river. A pale blue light, like a thin mist, enveloped the distant landscape. "The dream is over," murmured Marsa. "A far more beautiful one will soon begin," said Andras, "and that one will be the realization of what I have waited for all my life and never found love."

It went queerly by fits and starts, as though rheumatic and stiff in the joints from age, but it served the whole neighborhood, which would have thought it almost as impious to carry grain elsewhere as to attend any other religious service than the mass that was performed at the altar of the little old gray church, with its conical steeple, which stood opposite to it, and whose single bell rang morning, noon, and night with that strange, subdued, hollow sadness which every bell that hangs in the Low Countries seems to gain as an integral part of its melody.