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Updated: June 26, 2025
Under the blue haze of smoke that for a week has hung over this valley of the shadow of death the work which is to resurrect this stricken city has gone steadily forward. Here and there over the waste where Johnstown stood in its pride black smoke arises from the bonfires on which shattered house-walls, rafters, doors, broken furniture and all the flotsam and jetsam of the great flood is cast.
He might have more profitably wasted his time even on the smoke-blackened yellow-brick house-walls, with their juts and angles, and their clambering pipes of unknown employ, in the middle distance; or, in the foreground, the skylights of cluttered outbuildings, and the copings of the walls of grimy backyards, where the sooty trees were making a fight with the spring, and putting forth a rash of buds like green points of electric light: the same sort of light that showed in the eyes of a black cat seasonably appearing under them.
We went round violently as I emerged, and, clinging to the side, I saw, in a whirl, tall, baked, brown hills dropping sheer down to a strip of flat land and a belt of dark-green scrub at the water's edge; little pink squares of house-walls dropped here and there, mounting the hillside among palms, like men standing in tall grass, running back, hiding in a steep valley; silver-gray huts with ragged dun roofs, like dishevelled shocks of hair; a great pink church-face, very tall and narrow, pyramidal towards the top, and pierced for seven bells, but having only three.
The house-walls fade away, the winter sky brightens, the sun shines out, the weather grows warm and pleasant; flowers spring up, great trees cast a friendly shade, streams murmur cheerfully over their pebbly beds, jewelled fruits are to be had for the trouble of gathering them; invisible hands set out well-covered dinner-tables, brilliant and graceful forms flit in and out across our path, and we all at once find ourselves in the midst of a company of dear old friends whom we have known and loved ever since we knew anything.
I found most things cracked into tiny fragments, twisted, disfigured out of likeness, the house-walls themselves displaced a little at the nip, the bow of the cedar skiff smashed in to her middle against the aft starboard corner of the galley; and were it not for the fact that the air-pinnace had not broken from her heavy ropings, and one of the compasses still whole, I do not know what I should have done: for the four old water-logged boats in the cove have utterly disappeared.
The Captain Hernando Pizarro had departed with the hundred thousand pesos of gold and the five thousand marks of silver which were sent to His Majesty as his royal fifth; after that event, some ten or twelve days, the two Spaniards who were bringing gold from Cuzco arrived, and part of the gold was melted at once because it was in very small pieces; it equalled the sum of ... five hundred-odd plates of gold torn from some house-walls in Cuzco; and even the smallest plates weighed four or five pounds apiece; other, larger ones, weighed ten or twelve pounds, and with plates of this sort all the walls of that temple were covered.
Shocked at this sudden bitterness, touched to the quick by generous pity, regardless of possible onlookers here in the village street, where the hoof-beats of the trotting horses echoed loud from the house-walls on either side Damaris put her arms round Henrietta Frayling, clasping, kissing her. "Ah! don't, Henrietta," she cried. "Don't dare to say such ugly, lying things about your dear self.
So David build a timbered second story for Lucien, so as not to put too great a strain on the old rifted house-walls. He took pleasure in making the rooms where the fair Eve was to spend her life as brave as might be. It was a time of blithe and unmixed happiness for the friends.
Below him, nearer the shore, lay the village, its white house-walls lit by the moonlight, and beyond he could see the ships in the glittering bay. When the door opened such a feast of warmth and comfort appeared to his eyes that he did not soon forget it, for he had expected nothing but the necessaries of life.
So, while the house-walls gave back the ruddy glare of the torches, and the bare-footed, bare-headed, laughing colleens damped the thatch, and men confessed in one corner and kissed their girls in another, and the smiths in a third wrought hard at the pike-heads so the struggle depicted itself to more than one!
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