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The rider wiped the blood from his eyes, and turned up his face that he might see the better. But he seemed to be dazed, and only babbled strange words in a strange patois. She stamped her foot in passion. "More lights!" she cried. "Lights! How can they find their way? And let six men go down the digue, and meet them. Will you let them be butchered between the shore and this?"
Cherbourg was at that time a town of mean-looking houses and narrow streets, ill-paved, ill-lighted, a rookery for blackbirds of every breed. It was a great centre for smuggling and privateering, the fleet brought many hangers-on, and the building of the great digue drew thither rough toilers who could find, or were fitted for, no other employment.
Near the Casino there are a quantity of old-fashioned ramshackly bathing cabins on wheels, with very small boys cracking their whips and galloping up and down, from the digue to the edge of the water, on staid old horses who know their work perfectly put themselves at once into the shafts of the carriages never go beyond a certain limit in the sea. All the bathers are prudent.
Strolling the next afternoon with his new acquaintances along the Digue, a few steps in front of them he saw a lady, plainly and darkly but most elegantly dressed leaning on the arm of a tall man. They walked slowly, and were evidently lost in contemplation of the softly rolling sea.
In Captain Owen's chart, and in that in the "Atlas of the Voyage of the 'Favourite'," it appears that the east side of MAHE and the adjoining islands of ST. ANNE and CERF, are regularly fringed by coral-reefs. A portion of the S.E. part of CURIEUSE Island, the N., and part of the S.W. shore of PRASLIN Island, and the whole west side of DIGUE Island, appear fringed.
But there; let a single glimpse of this tawdry, perfumed, fevered hell suffice us, even as it did Archibald Rushford on the first night of his stay at Weet-sur-Mer, and let us go out, as he did, into the pure night, and stand uncovered under the bright stars until the cool breeze from the ocean has washed us clean again, and turning our backs forever upon the Casino and its habitués, retrace our steps along the Digue to the Grand Hôtel Royal.
This wild melody had been improvised by the group of painters, but revised and corrected by poet friends. Here it is: Oh! Peintres de la Dam' jolie, De vos pinceaux arretez la folie! Il faut descendr' des escabeaux, Vous nettoyer et vous faire tres beaux! Digue, dingue, donne! L'heure sonne. Digue, dingue, di.... C'est midi!
"There, there," and the American waved him to silence. "And you needn't charge yourself with his keep. But I hope you haven't any more skeletons in the closet, my friend." "Skeletons, monsieur?" "Such as Madame Pelletan." "Oh," said the Frenchman, naively, "Madame Pelletan iss quite t'e opposite off a skeleton, monsieur!" Rushford paused at the hotel door and looked out along the Digue.
But the present war is not merely a war for an idea, which of itself would be enough to make the war, in M. Thiers' refrain, digue de l'attention des hommes; but, like the wars of the sixteenth century or the French Revolutionary Wars, it is a war between two ideals, between two principles that strike deep into the life-history of modern States.
On the top another solid bed of branches is laid down, and the whole is first covered with concrete, and then with bricks or tiles, while the edge of the digue, at the top of the seaward slope, is composed of heavy blocks of stone cemented together and bound by iron rivets.
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