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Updated: June 12, 2025
In one corner of our room I discerned a brown toad of monstrous size squatting in great comfort on the damp flags. He was as big as a trussed chicken, and looked something like one in the twilight. We pointed him out to the administrador, who brought in two fierce watchdogs, but the toad set up his back and spirted his acrid liquor, and the dogs could not be got to go near him.
At the end of August toward midnight, when the day has been hot, an indistinct murmur rises about the kneeling villages. It is neither the sound of rivers, nor of springs, nor of the wind, nor of animals cropping the grass, nor of cattle rubbing their chains against the cribs, nor of uneasy watchdogs, nor of birds, nor of the falling of the looms of the weavers.
Already the village church bells were beginning to ring the alarm, as the pulpits beneath them had been ringing for many a year. In the awakening houses lights flashed from window to window. Drums beat faintly far away and on every side. Signal guns flashed and echoed. The watchdogs barked; the cocks crew. Stop the news! Stop the sunrise!
Soon they drew near to Louhi's dwelling, and the watchdogs began to bark more loudly than they had ever done before. Louhi's husband told his daughter to go and see what the trouble was, but she replied that she was busy grinding barley, and could not go. Then he told his wife to go, but she was too busy cooking dinner.
As she passed them the red-painted light-vessels, swung at their moorings, seemed for an instant to sail with great speed in the rush of tide, and the next moment were left hopelessly behind. The big buoys on the tails of banks slipped past her sides very low, and, dropping in her wake, tugged at their chains like fierce watchdogs. The reach narrowed; from both sides the land approached the ship.
She has her own band of watchdogs, as noisy, as futile, as unthinkingly clamorous as ever were those of France. The "Sleepless Watchdog" in France is known as a Chauvinist, in England as a Jingo, in Prussia as a Pangermanist. They all bay at the same moon, are excited over the same fancies; they hear nothing, see nothing but one another.
The woman is wretched; and now she sees me coming she pretends to be using her wits in studying the things about her, as I have directed. She is a riddle. I have the idea that any morning she may explode; and yet I trust her and sleep soundly. I must be free, though I vex the world's watchdogs. So, Danvers, you are noticing how thoroughly Frenchwomen do their work.
I remember those clear evenings when, after the peaceful navigation of the day, I used to stop and draw up my dahabiya to the bank of the river. As soon as I put foot upon the shore, and my arrival was signalled by the barking of the watchdogs, the chief of the nearest hamlet always came to meet me.
No, I saw her as the missionary of a strange thing, crossing oceans, daring thirst and gale and teeth of sharks, harrying deeper and deeper into the outseas of mystery that small, devoted, polyandrous company of husbands, at once her paddlers, cooks, flunkies, watchdogs, music makers. "Queen Daughter!"
So John pushed the remaining one hundred and fifty bonds into a dark corner of the vault and awaited the discovery with throbbing pulses. Yet, strange to relate, these watchdogs of finance, did not see the bonds which John had hidden, and did not discover that anything was wrong, since, for purposes of its own, the bank had neglected to make any record of the loan in question.
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