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Updated: June 5, 2025
"That shot knocked over fifteen chimney-pots and two weathercocks in Market-gate, went slap through a house in the suburbs, and finally stuck in the carcass of an old horse belonging to the Provost of the town, which didn't survive the shock the horse, I mean, not the Provost. "It is said that there was an old gentleman lying in bed in a room of the house that the shot went through.
Waves of sound passing through the water from the screw propeller of the torpedo, or, indeed, any ship, make and break the sensitive contact, and ring the bell or light the lamp. The apparatus is intended to alarm a fleet lying at anchor or a port in time of war. Electricity has also been employed to register the movements of weathercocks and anemometers.
As we rolled along the way, and passed the weathercocks on the temples, I saluted the symbol of the goddess Fortune with a reverent awe. "We have done our little endeavor," I said, bowing my head, "and mortals can do no more. But we might have fought bravely and not won. We might have cast the coin, calling, 'Head, and lo! Tail might have come uppermost."
Two meeting-houses stood on two eminences, facing each other, and looking like a couple of fighting-cocks with their necks straight up in the air, as if they would flap their roofs, the next thing, and crow out of their upstretched steeples, and peck at each other's glass eyes with their sharp-pointed weathercocks. The first was a good pattern of the real old-fashioned New England meeting-house.
But these knocking whales are seldom remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some old-fashioned churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for weathercocks; but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all intents and purposes so labelled with "Hands off!" you cannot examine them closely enough to decide upon their merit.
Yet there are such men, who, because their ancestors have done some valorous deed, think themselves fit to direct the machinery of a whole country, having from their youth learned nothing but to dance and to spin like weathercocks with their heads as well as their heels." Certainly Sainte Aldegonde had learned other lessons than these.
"That there has never been more than one will in the family, and that will is mine; that the minds of my two brothers turn according to the fancy of that will like weathercocks before the wind, and that he who has blown hot can blow cold." "I am still waiting for you to explain yourself, monsieur."
Then I take a turn over the city, gossip with the weathercocks, pay my compliments to the bells, inspect the fire-alarm, and pick up information by listening at the telegraph wires. People often talk about "a little bird" who spreads news; but they don't know how that figure of speech originated.
It must have been often observed how they turn against any object which has chanced to hurt them, or which has annoyed them by regular and repeated motions, how they start at the sudden appearance or oscillation of some unlooked-for thing, at an unusual light, a colour, a stone, a plant, at the fluttering of branches, of clothes, or weathercocks, at the rush of water, at the slightest movement or sound in the twilight, or in the darkness of night.
Folderol lays it down as a fixed principle in an able treatise upon the law of weathercocks, that if property be stolen from an individual, without the aggregate of that property suffering reduction or diminution, he is not robbed, and the crime of theft has not been committed.
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