United States or Lebanon ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


It was a pretty sight to see the cortège wind up the path the Bishop of Soissons and several other ecclesiastics in their robes, blackcoated officials, some uniforms the whole escorted by groups of children running alongside, and a fair sprinkling of women in light dresses, with flowers on their hats, making patches of colour.

"A very natural conclusion," laughed Anscombe again, "which I should advise them to leave untested. Hush! Here comes the show." I looked and saw a body of blackcoated gentlemen with one officer in the uniform of a Colonel of Engineers, advancing slowly. I remember that it reminded me of a funeral procession following the corpse of the Republic that had gone on ahead out of sight.

All the old blackcoated bustle with its cockney vivacity and vulgarity had disappeared. Groups of labourers, quietly but picturesquely clad, were passing up and down in sufficiently large numbers; but it required but a few mounted men to keep the streets in order.

After each one a little half-rustling movement through the crowded rows of clergymen passed mute judgment upon the cruel blow this brother had received, the reward justly given to this other, the favoritism by which a third had profited. The Presiding Elders, whose work all this was, stared with gloomy and impersonal abstraction down upon the rows of blackcoated humanity spread before them.