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Updated: June 11, 2025
"Show me a cheaper pulpit than that, and I'll buy it for kindling- wood. By the way, friends, two preachers over the mountain told me last night that I was doing more harm than good, talking without pay on the public highway as I am doing. I'd like to please every living soul, including them, if I could. It makes them mad to see you all gather to hear a jumping-jack like me.
The black, dead trees stood out distinctly against the starry sky, and from a cross-limb of one of them dangled something with head awry, like a broken jumping-jack, something that had once been a man—and her husband. She could touch the feet of this frightful thing and feel its human warmth.
When the earth failed under my feet, I thought my heart would have stopped; and a moment after I was demeaning myself in mid-air like a drunken jumping-jack. I have never been a model of piety, but at this juncture prayers and a cold sweat burst from me simultaneously.
The most interesting, everything considered, is that imbecile, that old fanatic of a Dubief, the man that never drank anything but sweetened water; for he, at least, was shot on the barricades by the Versaillese soldiers. One person of whom the very thought disgusted the two friends was that jumping-jack of an Arthur Papillon.
"How do you know all this?" "I know; 'cause Katy Black had a girl from New York visiting her, and she was just horrid! All stiff and mincy, and dropping curtseys every two minutes!" "But you're taught to drop curtseys." "Yes, when I enter or leave a room where there are ladies, but that girl was always at it, in school and everywhere." "Sort of a jumping-jack, wasn't she?
Oh! this'll be first rate." He bore her, kicking like a jumping-jack, across the kitchen to the closet where the pans and cooking utensils were kept. "Think it over in there, Zuby," he said calmly, shutting the door and planting himself in a chair against it. "That's a fine place to think. Now, Cap'n, you and me can have our smoke, while she's thinkin' what to give us to eat; hey?"
Somebody alive to the jest turned on steam, and of a sudden Cranze was plucked aloft, and hung there under the derrick-sheave, struggling impotently, like some insane jumping-jack. Amid the yells of laughter which followed, Hamilton laughed also, but rather hysterically. Kettle put a hand kindly on his wet shoulder. "Come on board again," he said.
The Baroness bowed with a smile, which said, had he chosen to interpret it, "I give you permission to carry her off now and forever, if you wish it." At that moment she was placing in the half-unwilling arms of Hubert Marien an enormous rubber balloon and a jumping-jack, in return for five Louis which he had laid humbly on her table.
And now, against that glowing plane of background opposite him, there appeared as he looked the slanted shadow of a swaying rope framed in at right and at left by two broader, deeper lines which were the shadows marking the timber uprights that supported the scaffold at its nearer corners; and also there appeared, midway between the framing shadows, down at the lower end of the slender line of the cord, an exaggerated, wriggling manifestation like the reflection of a huge and misshapen jumping-jack, which first would lengthen itself grotesquely, and then abruptly would shorten up, as the tremors running through the dying man's frame altered the silhouette cast by the oblique sunbeams; and along with this stencilled vision, as a part of it, occurred shifting shadow movements of two legs dancing busily on nothing, and of two foreshortened arms, flapping up and down.
I was all the time faithfully steering by the sign of the tobacco shop, and the shop with the jumping-jack in the window, and the garden with the iron fence, and the sentry box opposite a drug store, and all the rest of my landmarks, as carefully entered on my mental chart the day before.
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