United States or Isle of Man ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The 53d of the Browns had started for La Tir on the same day that the 128th of the Grays had started for South La Tir. While the 128th was going to new scenes, the 53d was returning to familiar ground. It had detrained in the capital of the province from which its ranks had been recruited.
As the Emperor passed me, before we started off, he said, handing me a little package he held in his hand, "Here is the gold button which you did not have last night; it makes you a life member of all Imperial hunts." I bowed very low and thanked him, and asked if it would necessitate my hunting. "Certainly not, if you don't want to," his Majesty answered; "but have you ever seen a chasse a tir?"
For the last week the people of La Tir had been returning to their homes, and with the early morning those from the country districts had come swarming in for the great day.
But as every wealthy American and “smart” Englishwoman passing the spring in Paris rushed for that too open circle, like tacks toward a magnet, it was finally cut by the “Duchesses,” who, together with such attractive aides-de-camp as the Princesse de Poix, Mmes. de Murat, de Morny, and de Broglie, inaugurated last spring “The Ladies’ Club of the Acacias,” on a tiny island belonging to the “Tir aux Pigeons,” which, for the moment, is the fad of its founders.
Her frown grew with the repetition of the word; her fingers closed in on her palm in vexation. He recollected that he had seen her like this two or three times at La Tir, when he had found the outbursts most entertaining. He imagined that the small fist pressed against the table edge could deliver a stinging blow. "As stupid as it is for neighbors to quarrel! It put me at war with all frontiers."
Had any one of these four heroes of the Grays in their heavy gilt frames divined what kind of a to-morrow his day was preparing? All knew the pass of La Tir well, and if all had not won decisive battles they would have been hung in the outer office or even in the corridors, where a line of half-forgotten or forgotten generals crooked down the stairways into the oblivion of the basement.
"I listen!" she added. "Of course, with our three millions against their five, the Grays will take the offensive," he said. "For us, the defensive. La Tir is in an angle. It does not belong in the permanent tactical line of our defences. Nevertheless, there will be hard fighting here.
In one Of them, when even the undertone had ceased for a few seconds, Marta caught faintly the groans of a wounded man one of the crew of a Gray dirigible burned by an explosion and brought in his agony softly to earth by a billowing piece of envelope which acted as a parachute. Fighting proceeded in La Tir in stages of ferocity and blank silence.
His wife told him that if he set foot in Erin he would never come back to her, and he would become a blind old man; and she asked him how long he thought it was since he came to Tir na n'Og. "About three years," he replied. "It is three hundred years," she said.
The range to every possible battery or infantry position around La Tir was already marked on his map. He passed the word to his guns. The burst of their first shrapnel-shell blinded all three actors in the scene on the crest of the knoll with its ear-splitting crack and the force of its concussion threw Stransky down beside the sergeant.
Word Of The Day