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Nor did he stop here, but made a hideous rout among the inventions and expedients of his learned predecessor rooting up his patent gallows, where caitiff vagabonds were suspended by the waistband; demolishing his flag-staffs and windmills, which, like mighty giants, guarded the ramparts of New Amsterdam; pitching to the Duyvel whole batteries of Quaker guns; and, in a word, turning topsy-turvy the whole philosophic, economic, and windmill system of the immortal sage of Saardam.
You will find a glorious stretch of velvet turf, seven acres of living carpet, level and green as a huge billard-table, skirted on the one hand by a rolling landscape, and hedged on the other by a row of primeval oaks. Flags flaunt from the flag-staffs, and the play-ground is guarded by guidons.
Back in the Bluegrass, the earth was flashing with dew, and the air was brilliant with a steady light that on its way from the sun was broken by hardly a cloud. The woodland was alive with bird-wing and bird-song and, under them, with the flash of metal and the joy of breaking camp. The town was a mighty pedestal for flag-staffs. Everywhere flags were shaken out.
At three o'clock a Staten Island ferry-boat ventured her nose out of her slip. The wind snapped off both flag-staffs and smokestack, hurled them into space, caught her in its mighty claws, dragged her helpless across the bay and flung her on the Staten Island shore. Wherever men could gather they talked in low, helpless and bewildered tones.
So clear was the sky she could see the flag-staffs of the great downtown buildings and back of them in the distant bay the pennant masts of ships at anchor. The trees in Central Park seemed to glow with the splendour of the dying autumn's sun. The glory of the day mocked her sorrow. "What does Nature care?" she sighed. "And yet who knows, it may be a token!
"Yudhishthira said, 'This my sacred and victorious and royal car which gladdeneth the heart and hath carried us hither, which is equal unto a thousand cars, which is of symmetrical proportions and covered with tiger- skin, and furnished with excellent wheels and flag-staffs which is handsome, and decked with strings of little bells, whose clatter is even like the roar of the clouds or of the ocean, and which is drawn by eight noble steeds known all over the kingdom and which are white as the moon- beam and from whose hoofs no terrestrial creature can escape this, O king, is my wealth with which I will stake with thee!"
This much is certain, that Governor Stuyvesant succeeded to the chair of state at a turbulent period, when foes thronged and threatened from without, when anarchy and stiff-necked opposition reigned rampant within; when the authority of their High Mightinesses the Lords States General, though supported by economy, and defended by speeches, protests, and proclamations, yet tottered to its very center; and when the great city of New Amsterdam, though fortified by flag-staffs, trumpeters, and windmills, seemed, like some fair lady of easy virtue, to lie open to attack, and ready to yield to the first invader.
Those masses of clouds by hundreds and thousands, commanded by Indra began to pour rain upon Khandava in showers thick as the flag-staffs of battle-cars. But the showers were all dried up in the sky itself by the heat of the fire and could not, therefore, reach the fire at all!
Fifty feet from the house was a building like a sentry-box, with two flag-staffs before it; it was the temple where the soldiers worshipped according to the ceremonies of their faith. I have been much with the army in my own country, but never saw a military post of two buildings where one structure was a chapel.
"Within a generation, the Brooklyn Bridge, a dream in the brain of a man, has spun its spider web of steel across the river, our buildings grown from four stories to towering castles of steel with their flag-staffs in the clouds. "Our nation has been baptised in blood and a new Constitution established. "The German Empire has been created, and a new map of the world made.
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