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The man had been well-dressed in brown and tawny velvet, was probably handsome in a sharp, foreign sort. There was a ring upon his finger, a torn badge upon his left breast, with traces of a device in white threads which could not be well made out. Puzzling over it, Prosper thought to read three white forms on it water-bougets, perhaps, or billets he could not be sure.

I think no more of it than of the snapping of one of the threads on yonder tapestry frame. It is for the king I grieve for the noble heart, the kindly soul, which might rise so high, and which is dragged so low, like a royal eagle with some foul weight which ever hampers its flight. It is for him and for France that my days are spent in sorrow and my nights upon my knees."

Nearly all bushmen who sleep with the warm earth for a bed will tell of this strange wakening moment, of that faint touch of half-consciousness, that whispering stir, strangely enough, only perceptible to the sleeping children of the bush one of the mysteries of nature that no man can fathom, one of the delicate threads with which the Wizard of Never-Never weaves his spells.

On this up went another shower of rockets, which continued without cessation, filling the air with long delicate threads of smoke, under which the vessels passed in safety, the effect being most beautiful. These events occupied some time; and as soon as the sternmost ships of the squadron were well out of range of shot, the Gorgon hoisted the signal for their return.

He was soon distracted from these trying observations, however, by the entrance of a dignified haughty-looking woman of about forty years; she was attired in the same simple costume which he had just admired on the young girl in the garden, except that her hair, sprinkled here and there with silver threads, was tucked neatly under an old-fashioned head-dress of muslin that strangely became her handsome face.

He knew that he would be given every opportunity to establish his innocence, but he could not rid himself of the ugly disconcerting belief that a man hunt was on, and that he, the hunted creature, was to be driven from cover to cover while the state drew its threads of testimony about him strand by strand, until they finally reached his very throat, choking, strangling, killing!

The nest when completed assumes the form of a large, suspended gourd. The walls are thin but firm, and proof against the most driving rain. The mouth is hemmed or overhanded with horse-hair, and the sides are usually sewed through and through with the same. Not particular as to the matter of secrecy, the bird is not particular to the material, so that be of the nature of the strings or threads.

He had succeeded in slipping noiselessly, like a snake, below the curtain into the cabinet. Craig had told him to look out for wires or threads stretched from Mrs. Popper's clothing to the bulging curtain of the cabinet.

But this was a little fat, weary-faced woman about fifty, who only did not look like a cook because she looked more like a sempstress. Her black dress was all covered with white threads. Mrs. Wilton looked at her with some embarrassment. It seemed more reasonable to be asking a woman like this about altering a gown than about intercourse with the dead.

In one, sailors were singing at their work; in another, there were men aloft, high over my head, hanging to threads that seemed no thicker than a spider's. Though I had lived by the shore all my life, I seemed never to have been near the sea till then. The smell of tar and salt was something new. I saw the most wonderful figureheads, that had all been far over the ocean.