D'Artagnan, the King Maker — page 256: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

His Own Host. 239 was about to leap out of the scroll frame, and, flinging her lapful of flowers on the beholder, finish the caper on the floor. Soon the art critic yawned. - Getting up, with an effort, he strolled to a window, deep in a recess, for it was cut in the wall and went out into a balcony; but it was all a wooden box, perforated but annoying the eye; the women who peeped out must have had little view for their pains. “Impossible to get a sight,” grumbled Porthos, see- ing double, although he complained. ‘And what to see at the best: that river running, running to make one giddy! ‘The wall where the citizen-soldiers are playing at soldier! the shops closed as in a great pest, fright- ened grocers fleeing from the wrath, thieves marking _ the houses they plan to plunder, all to cast the ignominy on the poor soldier! Bah! Would that the witches’ dance would begin!” Although bored, he stood there a long while, too in- dolent to move. He looked at the detached pavilion in the gardens. “Oho! Not at all a bad nest for a hornet to sally out of to make things hum! There are two or three cavaliers, whose horses were not taken from them, at the gates, halting at the garden wall. Can that Gascon be always right, and is that the rendezvous for the tim- orous duke? What skulkers! I shall always picture the Portuguese as cloaked and doing all deeds at mid- night!” Returning into the room, he placed nearby a splen- did Moorish panoply, on its frame and stand, and drawing ‘his sword, tried to rouse himself by fencing at it. He pinked the joints so that the original tenant, after this bout, would have resembled a patient under acu-puncture. “There,” said he, ceasing, and rubbing the slightly upturned point, to straighten it, on the carving knife, “if that had been even their Don Manuel the Lucky, he » had been wounded so that all Beyra’s oil would not ap- pease the aches.” He straddled a chair, as if in the saddle again. “As the colonel said, it is finer here than on that CORNICE OOOKS (CO im