新小说

第3章（第1页）

her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding

smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it.

Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained

herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a

youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers,

and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in

the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed

within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely

enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there

were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already

marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into

boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a

knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough

outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris,

there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts,

bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in

by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be

his tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that