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It was, in fact, the stopple in the mouth of the bottle-neck passage leading into North Central France, the passage through which ran the main road and, later, the railway from the frontier nearest Paris to the capital. But when the modern developments of artillery came, then Verdun, the old fortress that Vauban built for Louis XIV, lost its value.
Opening out into an oval basin, the inlet was again constricted, the bottle-neck entrance to a perfect haven being guarded by huge masses of limestone, weathered grotesquely, from the crevices of which sprays of peach-coloured orchids quivered, while the flora of land and sea commingled on the lustrous surface.
"Is this the stuff?" he demanded, holding it up to the sunlight which streamed down red on his hand from the robe of a martyr in one of the painted windows above. He pulled out his heavy knife, and with the back of it knocked off the bottle-neck. "I will trouble you to swear to the taste," said he. "I taste it only when our customers complain.
They end in a short bottle-neck that widens into a graceful mouth. They look like tiny vaccine-phials laid on their sides. All of them open into the passage. The inside of these little cells has the gloss and polish of a stucco which our most experienced plasterers might envy. It is diapered with faint longitudinal, diamond-shaped marks.
Nor do I know much about those things, and I am glad that I do not, for if I had devoted my early years of study to plinths, architraves, columns, dados, friezes, pediments, sconces, wainscots, cornices, capitals, entablatures, and such like, how could I have originated my theory of star-drift and how would humanity have been enlightened upon the all-important subjects of the asteroids, the satellites of the star Gamma in Scorpio, the atmosphere on the other side of the moon, the depth of the Martian bottle-neck seas, the probability of the existence of natural gas wells in Jupiter, etc., etc.? If I had been a Linnaeus or a Buffon instead of Reuben Baker, I should have never suffered myself to fall an innocent victim to poison ivy yes, that is true, but at the same time my now famous theory of double stars and my equally famous theory as to the several elements in comets' tails would have been denied to the world.
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