Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 18, 2025
One knife went right through him, and grated with a harsh squeak on the cobble-stones beneath. A moment later the traveler was lying there alone, half in the shadow, his dusty feet showing whitely in the moonlight. The three shadows had vanished as softly as they came.
Those weary footsteps thumping the pavements and the cobble-stones, made a noise like the surging of waves on a pebble beach a queer, muffled, shuffling sound, with a rhythm in it which stupefied one's senses if one listened to it long. I think something of this agony of a people in flight passed into my own body and brain that day.
Suddenly a black knight, mounted on a black horse and leading another horse by the bridle, clattered over the cobble-stones of the square, and taking his place by the fountain, called on the pages to come to him. In spite of the horseman's summons, however, the pages paid no attention to him at all.
I can see now the sleek-sided lorry horses in Hunt and Carton's yard, and I recall precisely the odour of the place as I passed through it that morning; the heavy, flat wads of blue-wrapped paper, and the fluttering bits of straw; the stamp of a draught horse's foot on cobble-stones. I saw the black, clean-cut shadow of the arched place.
Jack turned and caught Lorraine in both arms, and jumped to a sidewalk crowded with soldiers, and at the same time the crush of wagons ground the dog-cart to splinters on the cobble-stones. The crowd choked every inch of the pavement women, children, soldiers, shouting out something that seemed to move the masses to delirium.
So he put himself and his modest luggage inside and there was ample room to do this, for he was the only passenger plunged his feet into the straw which covered the floor, and endured for ten minutes such a shaking and rattling as only an omnibus moving over cobble-stones can produce.
One could almost imagine that he had survived the downfall and the Restoration, and a couple of republics, behind the high walls. The court-yard was paved with round cobble-stones no bigger than an apple, and, even by the flickering light of the lantern, it was perceptible that no weed had been allowed to grow between the stones or in the seams of the wide, low steps that led to an open door.
He tethered his horse to a gate-post and walked across the rough cobble-stones to the chapel. Its floor was still heaped with farm-tools and dried vegetables, and in the dimness a heavier veil of dust seemed to obscure the painted walls. Odo advanced, picking his way among broken ploughshares and stacks of maize, till he stood near the old marble altar, with its sea-gods and acanthus volutes.
Perhaps you think it is done off-hand. Well, it isn't. Ask any experienced draught-horse used to city trucking. He will tell you that wet cobble-stones, smoothed by much wear and greased with street slime, cannot be travelled heedlessly. Either the heel or the toe calks must find a crevice somewhere. If they do not, you are apt to go on your knees or slide on your haunches.
War had been declared, but it seemed remote in its actual cruelty. There was only the faint thrill of unaccustomed drama in the scenes which passed through these village streets as guns rattled over the cobble-stones, or as a squadron of light blue cavalry streamed by, with bronzed men who grinned at the peasant girls, and horses still groomed and glossy.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking