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On they went, suspended in mid-air at a giddy height, along interminable balconies without parapets; and below, the cliffs dropped avalanche-like, fell straight, bare, without a patch of vegetation or a tree. In places they looked as if they had been split down by the blows of an axe huge growths of petrified wood; in others they seemed sawn through shaley layers of slate.
In the village of Siloam I would not recommend the artist to loiter. A colony of ruffians inhabit the dismal place, who have guns as well as sticks at need. Their dogs howl after the strangers as they pass through; and over the parapets of their walls you are saluted by the scowls of a villanous set of countenances, that it is not good to see with one pair of eyes.
Here the background embraces the pauper burial-ground, the station of the Liverpool and Leeds railway, and, in the rear of this, the Workhouse, the "Poor-Law Bastille" of Manchester, which, like a citadel, looks threateningly down from behind its high walls and parapets on the hilltop, upon the working-people's quarter below.
And as the parapets usually had dissolved at the more dubious places, and I was told and heard that Fritz had machine guns trained on them, I did not waste much time experimenting. I found the firing-line, as one usually does, with surprise. There was a barrier of sandbags, oozing grey slime, and below, in a sort of little cave, with his body partly resting in a pool of water, a soldier asleep.
In 1804 the negro leaders proclaimed the independence of the island as the "Republic of Haiti," under a President who, appreciative of the example just set by Napoleon, informed his followers that he too had assumed the august title of "Emperor"! His immediate successor in African royalty was the notorious Henri Christophe, who gathered about him a nobility garish in color and taste including their sable lordships, the "Duke of Marmalade" and the "Count of Lemonade"; and who built the palace of "Sans Souci" and the countryseats of "Queen's Delight" and "King's Beautiful View," about which cluster tales of barbaric pleasure that rival the grim legends clinging to the parapets and enshrouding the dungeons of his mountain fortress of "La Ferriere."
Many a much-prized rarity have I obtained from Drake and Burnham and others of my townsmen, and from Denham in New York; and in my student years many a choice volume, sometimes even an Aldus or an Elzevir, have I found among the trumpery spread out on the parapets of the quays.
He, too, gave up a splendid position, as manager of a large mine in Cobalt, to go to the war. He was a very competent engineer and knew his work thoroughly. As we passed along his parapets we could hear the Germans talking, and a party of them out in front of their parapets were driving in stakes for their barbed wire.
Attempts made by day and night to bury some of these bodies had to be given up, as the enemy swept the parapets of both trenches, on the least sign of movement, with "whizz-bangs." The Western Ontario Battalion suffered horribly, a constant stream of stretchers coming through our lines, starting with daybreak.
"Well, a little rest, after what we have gone through, will do us no harm, and will fit us all the more for what is to follow. Who cares! To-day, to-morrow, or even later, we shall fight. If not to-day, well, let us make the most of it." Cheery groups collected in the trenches all along the line, men who hardly took the trouble to peer out over the parapets and watch for the coming of the enemy.
As these two descended towards the bridge they observed that both the Kensford water and the River Barle were pouring down in mighty floods from the melting of the snow. So great indeed was the torrent, after they united, that only the parapets of the bridge could be seen above the water, the road across either bank being covered and very deep on the hither side.
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