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Beneath the very centre of the triumphal arch, and directly under the sacred name of King William, there hung a black object larger than a man's head and in shape resembling a bunch of grapes. It was the swarm, and a very fine one, numbering as Captain Barker estimated twenty thousand workers at the very least. He ran under the arch, and nearly cricked his neck staring up at them.
And now the blue-eyed violets wanted to have a peep at the sun, and to nod at their old friend; but the leaves lay so wet and heavy upon them that they could hardly get out, and when they did, poor things, their heads were all bent down, and they looked as drooping as though their necks were cricked with sleeping in a damp bed.
The sandy bed of the bay was all ribbed with ripples. The island was humming and ticking like a watch with insect-noises: otherwise the deadly silence held. There were red-winged grasshoppers and great green-gray locust-looking crickets which whistled and "cricked" all night. We had to fetch our water from the water-tank boats, about a mile and a half distant, and haul it up in a water-cart.
The pale silvery straggling hairs might have been counted. The wrinkled skin was of a curious brown yellow, and the veins, instead of being blue, were outlined in Indian red. The impression given was that the flesh would be unpleasant and uncanny to the touch. The body was bent, and the neck eternally cricked backward in the effort of the eyes to look up.
All these contrivances are well known, but they were here fitted in perfection. The "Go-Ahead" then rose vertically. Her enormous dimensions gradually grew smaller to the eye, and the necks of the crowd were almost cricked as they gazed into the air. Gradually the whale became a porpoise, and the porpoise became a gudgeon.
Because I also was eager to reach the coast not to escape from the advancing Germans, for I had determined that I would do desperate things to get back for the siege of Paris, if history had to be written that way but because I must find a boat to carry a dispatch across the Channel, I waited with the crowd of fugitives, struggled with them for a seat in the train which left at dawn and endured another of those journeys when discomfort mocked at sleep, until sheer exhaustion made one doze for a minute of unconsciousness from which one awakened with a cricked neck and cramped limbs, to a reality of tragic things.
It caught him on the point of the chin, and his neck cricked like the bolt of a rifle. He fell limply on the ground and the jewels dropped from his hand. I picked them up and stuffed them into my breeches pocket. Then I pulled the pistol out of his belt. It was six-chambered, and I knew that only three had been emptied.
At the sound of it he rushed up the companion, and found all his crew on deck with their necks cricked back, barring one man, who that moment popped his head up through the fore-hatchway. "What on earth was that?" he asked. "A rocket, sir," said the chief boatman; "just sent up from Prussia Cove." Mr.
High on the bridge but the bridge soared into heaven a pilot's voice called out in the Island tongue. As the great bows glided by, missing the boat by a few yards, the three men stared aloft until they had almost cricked their necks; and aloft there, as Archelaus raised his lantern, the Commandant read the vessel's name "Milo" glimmering in tall gilt letters.
"'Tis your loss, too; for it was full of instruction, an' had a moral at the end in different letterin'. . . . You're upset this mornin', that's what you are: been up too early an' workin' too hard at that plasterin' job, whatever it is." The little man limped back into the roadway and cricked his head back for a gaze up at the chimneys.
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