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In the doorway of the mill stood a youth clad in the usual coarse cloth "guba" and half concealed by the door post. In one hand he held a double-barrelled musket, an implement not absolutely necessary for a miller. The old man addressed him while still a good way off: "Che timpu?" "Luna plina." A strange sort of greeting, more like an exchange of pass-words.
We mean by "secret societies" not literary, scientific, or college associations, which merely use privacy as a screen against intrusion, but those affiliated and centralized "orders" spreading over the land, professing mysteries, practicing secret rites, binding by oaths, admitting by signs and pass-words, solemnly pledging their members to mutual protection, and commonly constructed in "degrees," each higher one imposing fresh fees, oaths, and obligations, and swearing the initiated to secrecy even from lower "degrees" in the same Order.
Perhaps their boasted secrets are only signs, grips, pass-words, and absurd rites of initiation. To swear by the name of the Lord about things of this kind is certainly a violation of the third commandment. The candidate does not know that the secrets about to be disclosed to him are of any importance, and he runs the risk of using God's name and oath about light and trivial things.
Cyrus will bring me the pass-words and signs; I shall send off the messengers, and then I shall still be in time for action." "Messengers! To whom?" "To Barkas. He is at the head of more than a thousand Libyan peasants and slaves. I shall send one, too, to Pachomius to bid him win us over adherents among the Biamite fishermen and the population of the eastern Delta." "Right, right I know.
The sentences were pass-words of a secret association of which the countess's father had been a member, and which were widely whispered among patriotic Poles. "The dawn will soon be at hand. We must get up in the morning. Poland will yet be free."
He then proceeded to explain the circumstances of their residence at Count Preskoff's, of their recommendation to the intendant of the countess's estates in Poland, of their acquaintance with the insurgent pass-words, and their meeting with the sergeant at Odessa. When they had concluded, the young leader held out his hand to them.
“Can you get me a permit?” asked Calhoun, eagerly. “There is Jim Grantham,” replied Kate, thoughtfully; “his description will suit Calhoun close enough. I can get Jim to loan you his.” Calhoun was now told that the Southern people in Nashville were thoroughly organized into a secret society. They had their signs and pass-words, so that they could know each other.
It gave her, therefore, no satisfaction to find herself included among Madame Adelschein's intimates. It embarrassed her to feel that she was expected to be "queer" and "different," to respond to pass-words and talk in innuendo, to associate with the equivocal and the subterranean and affect to despise the ingenuous daylight joys which really satisfied her soul.
For this humour, never merely local, never bases its appeal on small private sympathies and understandings and pass-words which leave the world at large cold, or mystified, or even disgusted.
But when, at the expiration of these lugubrious twenty-four hours, she beheld Jean Valjean again, she gave vent to such a cry of joy, that any thoughtful person who had chanced to hear that cry, would have guessed that it issued from an abyss. Fauchelevent belonged to the convent and knew the pass-words. All the doors opened.
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