A Gentleman from Gascony: A Romance of the Huguenots — page 186: what you’re looking at

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

182 A GENTLEMAN FROM GASCONY. “ Babette,” replied Mirza, drawing a white handker- chief from her belt, and passing it twice across her lips. As if in answer to a signal, which indeed it was, a figure stole softly from the stairway and crossed the platform with catlike step, close to the parapet, just be- hind where Mirza and the sentinel were standing. It was an odd-looking figure, a youth with tangled red hair, in ill-fitting peasant’s dress of dark blouse and full, baggy breeches. His progress was so noiseless that Griffo, engrossed with the bottle and the captivating yellow-haired girl, heard not a sound. “ Babette,” said the sentinel, far more neglectful of his duty than he imagined. “Babette! ’Tis a beauti- ful name. Your health, Babette!” he continued un- steadily, too unsteadily considering the amount of wine he had drunk (if indeed the flask did not contain some drug much more potent than the mere juice of the grape). “Your health, Babette! And your brother? What do you call him?” ‘“ Pierre,” replied the girl, who, with her heart in her mouth, was watching out of the corner of her eye the fiery-headed intruder as he crawled with velvet step closer and closer to the tower with its barred window. “I drink to Pierre! I drink to all your family,” de. clared Griffo, gallantly, suiting the action to the word. The man in the peasant’s dress had reached the tower, and as the sentinel raised the bottle to his lips, he laid his hand on the rough stone-work, and with the agility of a cat, clinging to the projections, he clambered up the ten feet of wall between him and the window, and finally clung to the iron bars, resembling in the moon- light some enormous bat with folded wings. “Your brother’s a long time coming, my pretty Ba- Comicbooks (E(@)