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Updated: May 13, 2025
In ten minutes after the strangers had departed, Franz was on the road to the Piazza de Spagni, listening with studied indifference to the learned dissertation delivered by Albert, after the manner of Pliny and Calpurnius, touching the iron-pointed nets used to prevent the ferocious beasts from springing on the spectators.
They seem perfectly intelligent; six days a week they yoke his stout oxen before a great American plow, turn his soil, scatter his fertilizer, after the harvest help him sort out the best grain for the next sowing, and so forth; but the seventh day of the week they hitch their wives beside an ass, and tickle the soil with their iron-pointed stick. "Why should we put on fertilizer?" they ask.
A few of the men wore red coats and belonged to the hunt; the rest were shepherds and farmers whom custom entitled to join in the sport. All carried long iron-pointed poles and waited with keen expectation the reappearance of the otter. Grace was perhaps the only one to feel a touch of pity for the exhausted animal and she wondered whether this was not a sentimental weakness.
Every bit of cordage was put on board. We took our places, and with our sail set, Hans steered us along the coast to Cape Saknussemm. The wind was unfavourable to a species of launch not calculated for shallow water. In many places we were obliged to push ourselves along with iron-pointed sticks. Often the sunken rocks just beneath the surface obliged us to deviate from our straight course.
A third mule being added for the joint use of the gentlemen, and all being equipped with iron-pointed poles, off we start in high spirits. A glorious day; air clear as crystal, sky with as fixed a blue as if it could not think a cloud; guides congratulate us, "Qu'il fait tres beau!"
Then would follow a great noise and uproar and hurry in the castle court-yard below; men shouting and calling to one another, the ringing of armor, and the clatter of horses' hoofs upon the hard stone. With the creaking and groaning of the windlass the iron-pointed portcullis would be slowly raised, and with a clank and rattle and clash of iron chains the drawbridge would fall crashing.
It opens with a picture of the author toiling across a bare common in a hot summer day, and reaching at last a ruined hut surrounded with tall trees, where he meets by appointment with a hale old man, with an iron-pointed staff lying beside him.
Acrobats practising their tours de force, tragedians with tense faces declaiming in a high falsetto to imaginary audiences, rag-pickers sorting their fulsome wares with iron-pointed sticks, herds of coarse, black swine being bought and sold, while in the shelter of the enormous buttresses archers erect paper targets some eight inches square and exercise their art with solemn dignity, elaborate posturing and considerable dexterity.
On the right and left, at the end of the pipe, were two blocks, by means of which the iron-pointed beam, which lay in the pipe, was moved. There were numerous rollers enclosed in the pipe itself under the beam, which made its movements quicker and stronger. Numerous arches were erected along the pipe above the beam which was in it, to hold up the rawhide in which this machine was enveloped.
"'Full of life and vivacity, the young wife went on from one point to another, higher and higher; her lithe figure brought out against the sky, as occasionally she plunged her iron-pointed staff deep into the snow, and turned to admire the vast panorama at her feet.
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