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She disturbed a flock of parrots in the white cedar tree, and a covey of duck rose with a whirring of pinions and a mighty quacking, shaking the drips off their plumage so that they glittered like diamonds in the sun. From the limbs of the dead gum tree hung flying foxes, their bat-like wings extended limply, and a gigantic crane stood in melancholy reflection upon one leg.
He was standing before her with his head down, and a sense that, naive and bat-like as he was, there was something in him she could not reach or understand, made her cry out: "I've not been nice to you. Forgive me, Edward! I'm so unhappy." "There was a Greek who used to say: 'God is the helping of man by man. It isn't true, but it's beautiful. Good-bye, dear Leila, and don't be sorrowful."
Undefined and extraordinary shapes, whether men or women, beings of this world or of another they could not tell, though they judged them the latter, flew past with wild whoops and piercing cries, flapping the air as if with great leathern bat-like wings, or bestriding black, monstrous, misshapen steeds. Fantastical and grotesque were these objects, yet hideous and appalling.
But, as if the darkness had been too long an inmate to be easily expelled, and had dyed with blackness the walls to which, bat-like, it had clung, these tapers served but ill to light up the gloomy hangings, and seemed to throw yet darker shadows into the hollows of the deep-wrought cornice.
And as the fence grew, Dan lent a hand here and there, the rejected and the staff indulged in glorious washing-days among the lilies of the Reach; Cheon haunted the vegetable patch like a disconsolate ghost; while Billy Muck, the rainmaker, hovered bat-like over his melons, lending a hand also with the fence when called upon.
Bat-like creatures, half brigands and lackeys; all the sorts of vespertillos that that twilight called war engenders; wearers of uniforms, who take no part in the fighting; pretended invalids; formidable limpers; interloping sutlers, trotting along in little carts, sometimes accompanied by their wives, and stealing things which they sell again; beggars offering themselves as guides to officers; soldiers' servants; marauders; armies on the march in days gone by, we are not speaking of the present, dragged all this behind them, so that in the special language they are called "stragglers."
The Señor Esteban would watch, standing silently, this bat-like evening club, which was kept quietly hidden from those belonging to the National Militia of Toledo. When the war terminated, the last illusions of the gardener vanished, he fell into the silence of despair and wished to know of nothing outside the Cathedral.
He had told himself bitterly as he walked through the streets that she was a figure of the womanhood of her country, a bat-like soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness, tarrying awhile, loveless and sinless, with her mild lover and leaving him to whisper of innocent transgressions in the latticed ear of a priest.
They marched directly across the arena toward the rocks upon the opposite side, where, spreading their bat-like wings, they rose above the high wall of the pit, settling down upon the bowlders above. These were the reserved seats, the boxes of the elect. Reptiles that they are, the rough surface of a great stone is to them as plush as upholstery to us.
The gaily coloured flags waved merrily in the air, the trumpets and clarions sounded cheerily. The nobility and clergy were in their most gorgeous attire. On every side were the signs of joy and thanksgiving. But the hearts of the people were all oppressed, and many a sorrowful eye gazed at the morning sky, as if expecting to see Satan flying down with his bat-like wings.
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