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Then he was conducted to the splendid structure which had been prepared for him gaily mounted the outside steps, and from the top-most stair bowed to his innumerable crowd of subjects; and while he awaited the procession from the harbor which escorted Bent-Anat in her litter, he inspected the thousand decorated bulls and antelopes which were to be slaughtered as a thank-offering to the Gods, the tame lions and leopards, the rare trees in whose branches perched gaily-colored birds, the giraffes, and chariots to which ostriches were harnessed, which all marched past him in a long array.
Accordingly the trio of boys in faded khaki suits, that looked as though they had seen considerable service, proceeded to perch upon the top-most rail of a fence at a point where a splendid oak tree threw its wide-spreading branches over the road.
He had genius; that is, he possessed the secret of extracting from himself and from his followers the last refinement of devotion to purpose. There was a certainty, from first to last, that effort would not flag at any point short of the top-most possible strain. The great star of America was no more than a nebulous splendor on the horizon in 1779. It was a new world forming by the law of youth.
Again and again the house rose to her, the noise of greeting was deafening, and a perfect avalanche of flowers covered the stage. From boxes, from parquet, from crowded balcony, from top-most gallery the enthusiastic outburst came, spontaneous, ever growing in volume of sound, apparently never ending.
"I have a fair, green nest in the fork of a top-most branch, and a lovely wife and three young babies, with skins as soft as silk." "I couldn't climb high enough!" Phil said regretfully. He had been "a regular duffer" at climbing at school, and the bigger boys had often dragged him up a fairly tall tree and left him there, clinging helplessly to the boughs, until they were tired of jeering at him.
So Kat rushed to the door, and shouted: "Er-nes-tin-e-e, cakes are getting cold," with an amount of energy and noise that might have reached that young lady, had she been sitting on the top-most round of the farthest chimney; but there was no response of any kind, neither was there any indications of a light up stairs, so Kat went back, remarking, as she again fell to work: "She's put on her new toggery, most likely, and gone somewhere."
He turned a white face that gave me half an instant's pause. "It's all over with me this time," he said. "But, I say, I was right about the cargo?" And I heard a chuckle as I reached the ladder; but Ready was no longer in my mind; even Eva was driven out of it, as I stood aghast on the top-most rung.
That third evening I was sitting within my bolted doors you asleep on your pillow by my side when a step came up the stair, and I knew it must be for me; for ours were the top-most rooms. Some one knocked; I held my very breath. But some one spoke, and I knew it was the good Doctor Voss. Then I crept to the door, and answered. 'Are you alone? asked I. 'Yes, said he, in a still lower voice.
It was in the flicker of fancy, no doubt, that as I hung about the great top-most terrace in especial, and then again took my way through the high gaunt corridors and the square and bare alcoved and recessed saloons, all overscored with such a dim waste of those painted, those delicate and capricious decorations which the loggie of the Vatican promptly borrowed from the ruins of the Palatine, or from whatever other revealed and inspiring ancientries, and which make ghostly confession here of that descent, I gave the rein to my sense of the sinister too, of that vague after-taste as of evil things that lurks so often, for a suspicious sensibility, wherever the terrible game of the life of the Renaissance was played as the Italians played it; wherever the huge tessellated chessboard seems to stretch about us; swept bare, almost always violently swept bare, of its chiselled and shifting figures, of every value and degree, but with this echoing desolation itself representing the long gasp, as it were, of overstrained time, the great after-hush that follows on things too wonderful or dreadful.
Then he was conducted to the splendid structure which had been prepared for him gaily mounted the outside steps, and from the top-most stair bowed to his innumerable crowd of subjects; and while he awaited the procession from the harbor which escorted Bent-Anat in her litter, he inspected the thousand decorated bulls and antelopes which were to be slaughtered as a thank-offering to the Gods, the tame lions and leopards, the rare trees in whose branches perched gaily-colored birds, the giraffes, and chariots to which ostriches were harnessed, which all marched past him in a long array.
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