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Your guest-chamber in a well-to-do family residence has probably a window twenty by eight feet, sashless, but with several lace curtains and shutters to suit the weather. The walls are tinted with the Spaniard's eye for rich color display, the massive furniture is solid carved old mahogany, and the graceful mosquito curtains suggest experiences better left untold.

When the old men parted, Clethera examined her grandmother with stealthy eyes in a kind of aboriginal reconnoitring. Melinda Cree's black hair and dark masses of wrinkles showed through a sashless shed window where she stood at her ironing-board. Her stoical eyelids were lowered, and she moved with the rhythmical motion of the smoothing-iron.

These thoughts were interrupted by sounds as of altercation. I had nearly reached the end of the lane, where I should again emerge into the White man's world, and where I was now walking the lane spread into a broader space with ells and angles and rotting steps, and habitations mostly too ruinous to be inhabited. It was from a sashless window in one of these that the angry voices came.

The prisoner glanced back: the maimed poplars stood out stark against a sky washed with wave after wave of infernal light.... Some time later he was conscious of a cobbled way beneath his sodden footgear. They were entering the outskirts of a ruined village. On either hand fragments of walls reared up with sashless windows and gaping doors like death masks of mad folk stricken in paroxysm.

Its sashless windows and defective chinks were gilded with the yellow light that comes from a glowing hearth. "I know this place!" exclaimed Annabel. "It is where the Saint-Michels used to live before they went to my father's settlement at Le Rayville. Look at the house! Nobody lives there. It must be full of witches." Violin music testified that the witches were merry.

Herein was, on either hand, a triple tier of beds, where miners had once lain; and the other gable was pierced by a sashless window and a doorless doorway opening on the air of heaven, five feet above the ground.

The window, sashless of course, was choked with the green and sweetly smelling foliage of a bay; and through a chink in the floor, a spray of poison oak had shot up and was handsomely prospering in the interior. It was my first care to cut away that poison oak, Fanny standing by at a respectful distance. That was our first improvement by which we took possession.

The little area in front of the basement was heaped with a mixture of mortar, bricks, laths, and shavings from the interior; the brownstone steps to the front door were similarly bestrewn; the doorway showed the half-open, rough pine carpenter's sketch of an unfinished house; the sashless windows of every story showed the activity of workmen within; the clatter of hammers and the hiss of saws came out to them from every opening.

From the sashless windows grotesque faces stared down upon him, scowling malignantly, while others, with still more hideous smile, invited him to enter and become one of their dreadful company. Insane laughter re-echoed in his ears, and the music of lutes, irresistible in its languor-compelling potency.

Fremont heard only the sweep of the rain outside for a moment, and then the voice of the guard came through the sashless window opening. "I'm going in to warm up a bit," he said. "All right," the renegade replied. "I'll let you know when to go on guard again. Boy," he added, facing Fremont with lowering brows, "I can make it to your advantage to tell me all about your connection with Cameron."