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He would halt now and then and wave his long, ape-like arms cursing the deep strip of sea water that prevented him from crossing to the hard desert of sand beyond far out upon which lay an upturned gabion. Within this locked and stranded box lay two dead bodies.
And I should be ungrateful indeed if I omitted, while standing on the threshold of this dreadful and veracious story, to thank the present management the Opera, which has so kindly assisted me in all my inquiries, and M. Messager in particular, together with M. Gabion, the acting-manager, and that most amiable of men, the architect intrusted with the preservation of the building, who did not hesitate to lend me the works of Charles Garnier, although he was almost sure that I would never return them to him.
How he does love to shoot and what a rattling good shot he is! Neither Tanrade nor myself, and we have shot with him day in and day out on the marsh and during rough nights in his gabion, has ever beaten him. On we flew, past the hamlet of Fourche-la-Ville, past Javonne, past Les Roses. Sacristi! I thought, what if the gasoline gave out or the spark refused to sparkle, what if they had Why worry?
And he fumbled in the shadow of the narrow shelf. I had hardly lighted my own over the candle-flame, which he held for me, when I felt a gentle rocking and heard the shells rattle as they rolled to the end of the shelf, stop, and roll back again. "Do not be alarmed," he laughed, "it's only the water filling the outer jacket of my gabion.
It will not easily be forgotten that the Eighth, who had been especially affected by gabion manufacture, awoke one morning and, instead of the stars and stripes, found a large sheet floating from their flagstaff with the inscription: "Peck's Avengers, or the Basket-Makers of the Nansemond."
"It will be in the north again to-night; we shall have a full moon and better luck, I hope. Do you know," he went on excitedly, "that one night last October I killed forty-two ducks alone in this old gabion. Forty-two! Twenty mallards and the rest Vignon and not a shot before one o'clock in the morning. Then they came in, right and left.
He had his own gabion now at the lower end of the bay at Pont du Sable, in which he slept and shot from nights when the wind was northeast a comfortable, floating box of a duck-blind sunk in an outer jacket of tarred planks and chained to a heavy picket driven in the mud and wire grass, for the current ran dangerously strong there when the tide was running out.
Simon Patrick, Bishop of Ely, in conversation with Evelyn Pierrepoint, Marquis of Dorchester, who was explaining to him the difference between a gabion considered singly and when used in the parapet of a field work, and between palisades and fraises; the former being a row of posts driven info the ground in front of the tents, for the purpose of protecting the camp; the latter sharp-pointed stakes set up under the wall of a fortress, to prevent the escalade of the besiegers and the desertion of the besieged; and the marquis was explaining further the method of placing fraises in the ditches of redoubts, half of each stake being buried and half exposed.
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