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Updated: June 9, 2025
How I remember every white-walled cottage, and the beetling cliffs, and that bold headland beside which the valley opens, with its dark-green woods, and then Spike Island. And what a stir is yonder, early as it is; the men-of-war tenders seem alive with people, while still the little village is sunk in slumber, not a smoke-wreath rising from its silent hearths.
He remained thus for perhaps three or four minutes, when I saw him assume a more eager look, and presently he turned round and hailed: "On deck there! there certainly is firing going on somewhere in our neighbourhood, sir, for I have just heard it most distinctly; and a moment before I spoke I thought I caught sight of something like a smoke-wreath gleaming in the sun away yonder, broad on our weather bow.
With a cheerful equanimity I contemplated the prospect of his receiving a very slight contusion from a spent bullet on a soft part of his frame. Ping, ping, came a few reports, but evidently out of range. Each smoke-wreath was in a different direction.
A white smoke-wreath rising occasionally, enwraps a shattered wall as in a shroud. A gleam of flame shoots a grotesque picture of broken arches and ragged chimneys into the brain. Huge piles of debris begin to encumber the sidewalks, and even the pavements, as we go on. The streets in some places are quite choked up from walking. We are among the ruins of half a city.
Between five and six o'clock immense flights of swallows and martins suddenly appeared above the eyot, arriving, not in hundreds, but in thousands and tens of thousands. The air was thick with them, and their numbers increased from minute to minute. Part drifted above, in clouds, twisting round like soot in a smoke-wreath.
He filled his long pipe full of tobacco, and then he tilted it upside down and sucked in the light of the candle. Puff! puff! puff! and a cloud of smoke went up about his head, so that you could just see his red nose shining through it, and his bright eyes twinkling in the midst of the smoke-wreath, like two stars through a thin cloud on a summer night.
Just outside St Egbert’s there is a high breezy sweep of downs, falling suddenly to a chalky seaward cliff. It overlooks the town and the undulating inland country and a great spread of shining sea; and even without a spy-glass you can see sail after sail and smoke-wreath after smoke-wreath go by all day long. But Mr Bunker had apparently walked there for other reasons than to see the view.
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