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She was regarded as peculiarly the friend of the poor and the humble; and at all the hearth-fires in the cottages of that retired valley, her name was pronounced in tones almost of adoration. More and more Madame Roland and her husband began to identify their interests with those of the poor around them, and to plead with tongue and pen for popular rights.
So, without further word, we followed the messenger up the long, narrow, wooden-gabled street, and heard the folk muttering gloomily in the darkness within, or talking softly in the dull russet glow of their hearth-fires. For there were but few lighted candles in Thorn that night.
Scarcely did the morrow shed on the mountain-tops the beams of risen day, as the horses of the sun begin to rise from the deep flood and breathe light from their lifted nostrils; Rutulian and Teucrian men measured out and made ready a field of battle under the great city's ramparts, and midway in it hearth-fires and grassy altars to the gods of both peoples; while others bore spring water and fire, draped in priestly dress and their brows bound with grass of the field.
"What are those?" I inquired of my Tunguse driver. "Yakut," was the brief reply. They were columns of smoke, sixty or seventy feet in height, over the chimneys of Yakut farmhouses; and they stood so vertically in the cold, motionless air of the arctic night that they were lighted up, to their very summits, by the hearth-fires underneath.
'The path is clear. The Snake returns to the House of its Birth. An attendant led forward a black goat, which bleated feebly. With a huge antique knife the old man slit its throat, catching the blood in a stone ewer. Some was flung on the fire, which had burned small and low. 'Even so, cried the priest, 'will the king quench in blood the hearth-fires of his foes.
And his parting words, I hear them now, even more earnestly than when they were first spoken: 'Should fortune cheat you with the apples of Sodom, return to your home again. Its doors will ever be open, and its hearth-fires bright for you as of old. Ah! do the fires still burn? How many years have passed since I went forth! And Ellen? But I dare not think of her. It is too late too late!
It had the best of taste, the best of inexpensive rugs, a simple and laudable architecture, and the latest conveniences. Throughout, electricity took the place of candles and slatternly hearth-fires. Along the bedroom baseboard were three plugs for electric lamps, concealed by little brass doors.
Overhead, the larger stars came out and winked at me, and then, as the fields of space became more and more lighted with star-points, the hearth-fires to other homes of worlds, I thought how local, after all, is the great cone of shadow we men call night; for it is only nature's nightcap for the nodding earth, as she turns her head away from the sun to lie pillowed in space.
What matter that the thought of Vesta stabbed him nigh to madness when he looked on hearth-fires that could never blaze for him? With courage almost more than human he put that fond ambition out of mind as if it were another sword he'd learned to sheathe. At first it would not stay in hiding, but flew the scabbard of his will to thrust him sore as often as he put it from him.
They pull the altars to pieces; through all the air goes a thick storm of weapons, and faster falls the iron rain. Bowls and hearth-fires are carried off; Latinus himself retreats, bearing the outraged gods of the broken treaty. The others harness their chariots, or vault upon their horses and come up with swords drawn.
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