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There used to be an Indian woman at Olancha who made bottle-neck trinket baskets in the rattlesnake pattern, and could accommodate the design to the swelling bowl and flat shoulder of the basket without sensible disproportion, and so cleverly that you might own one a year without thinking how it was done; but Seyavi's baskets had a touch beyond cleverness.

"The devil must have led us astray, sir," answered the distracted servant. "It's not natural ... there's mischief at the bottom of it!" I would have checked him but at that instant my ear caught a sound, distinct but not loud, that engrossed my whole attention. There was a faint "pop" as though someone had drawn a stiff cork from a narrow bottle-neck. The sound came from somewhere not far off.

The wistaria to which she had clung was broken away in several spots, a whole spray of it fluttered loose from the wall. Here it was that she must have lost her balance. Her head had struck one of the ornamental stone baskets of fruit, after which it seemed that her body had ricochetted, her head doubling under her. The broken bottle-neck caused the little doctor complete mystification.

But the bottle-neck did not recognize her, for he was not listening to what this old maid said and still that was because he was thinking of her. My father left me the best inheritance; to wit good humour. And who was my father? Why, that has nothing to do with the humour. He was lively and stout, round and fat; and his outer and inner man were in direct contradiction to his calling.

If only our Admiralty would tell the German public what that toll is now, there would come a time when German seamen would no longer consent to go down in them. Consider, however, what a submarine campaign would be for Great Britain if instead of struggling through this bottle-neck it were conducted from the coast of Norway, where these pests might harbour in a hundred fiords.

I've been in the fire and the water, have been deep in the black earth, and have mounted higher than most of the others; and now I'm hanging here, outside the birdcage, in the air and the sunshine! Oh, it would be quite worth while to hear my history; but I don't speak aloud of it, because I can't." And now the Bottle-neck told its story, which was sufficiently remarkable.

Our airmen had already got the situation well in hand here, and the road soon became a veritable shambles. The enemy had been forced or shepherded by our infantry into this bottle-neck, and our airmen, swooping down to 200 feet and bombing the head of the column, soon made the road impassable.

The basin comes to a bottle-neck between two high hills; all you have to do is dam that narrow gorge, and when the Rio San Gregorio is up and brimming in freshet time, you'll have a lake a hundred feet deep, a mile wide, and five miles long before you know it.

At last came an hour when the party under O'Halloran must turn to the east, where the bottle-neck of Winnipeg split in two, going down that well-worn way which led to Lake of the Woods, Rainy River, and at last to the wide lakes, whose sparkling waves would waft them on to the great outside world.

Through the bottle-neck of Brentford, the most disgraceful main entrance in the world into any great city, with bare room for a criminal double line of tramways blocked by heavy, horse-drawn traffic, an officially organised murder-trap for all save the shrinking pedestrian on the mean, narrow, greasy side-walk, we crawled as fast as we were able.