4. I exhort you, then, most earnestly, to vote these extraordinary supplies; and God grant they may prove sufficient! Vote, then, I beseech you; for, even if you doubt the expediency of the means, you know perfectly well that the supplies are necessary, and that you are incapable of raising them in any other way. Vote them at once, for the crisis does not admit of delay; and, if it occurs, we must be responsible for the consequences.
5. Beware of asking for time. Misfortune accords it never. While you are lingering, the evil day will come upon you. Why, gentlemen, it is but a few days since, that upon occasion of some foolish bustle in the Palais Royal, some ridiculous insurrection that existed nowhere but in the heads of a few weak or designing individuals, we were told with emphasis, "Catiline is at the gates of Rome, and yet we deliberate."
6. We know, gentlemen, that this was all imagination. We are far from being at Rome; nor is there any Catiline at the gates of Paris. But now are we threatened with a real danger; bankruptcy, national bankruptcy, is before you; it threatens to swallow up your persons, your property, your honor,—and yet you deliberate.
Mirabeau.
THE LANTERN BEARERS.
1. These boys congregated every autumn about a certain easterly fisher-village, where they tasted in a high degree the glory of existence. The place was created seemingly on purpose for the diversion of young gentlemen. A street or two of houses, mostly red and many of them tiled; a number of fine trees clustered about the manse and the kirkyard, and turning the chief street into a shady alley; many little gardens more than usually bright with flowers; nets a-drying, and fisher-wives scolding in the backward parts; a smell of fish, a genial smell of seaweed; whiffs of blowing sand at the street corners; shops with golf-balls and bottled lollipops; such, as well as memory serves me, were the ingredients of the town.
2. These, you are to conceive posted on a spit between two sandy bays, and sparsely flanked with villas—enough for the boys to lodge in with their subsidiary parents, not enough (not yet enough) to cocknify the scene; a haven in the rocks in front: in front of that, a file of gray islets; to the left, endless links and sand wreaths, a wilderness of hiding-holes, alive with popping rabbits and soaring gulls: to the right, a range of seaward crags, one rugged brow beyond another; the ruins of a mighty and ancient fortress on the brink of one; coves between—now charmed into sunshine quiet, now whistling with wind and clamorous with bursting surges; the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and southernwood, the air at the cliff's edge brisk and clean and pungent of the sea—in front of all, the Bass Rock, tilted seaward like a doubtful bather, the surf ringing it with white, the solan-geese hanging round its summit like a great and glittering smoke.
3. This choice piece of seaboard was sacred, besides, to the wrecker; and the Bass, in the eye of fancy, still flew the colors of King James; and in the ear of fancy the arches of Tantallon still rang with horse-shoe iron, and echoed to the commands of Bell—the—Cat.
4. ... But what my memory dwells upon the most was a sport peculiar to the place, and indeed to a week or so of our two months' holiday there. Maybe it still flourishes in its native spot; for boys and their pastimes are swayed by periodic forces inscrutable to man; so that tops and marbles reappear in their due season, regular like the sun and moon; and the harmless art of knuckle-bones has seen the fall of the Roman empire and the rise of the United States.