第501页 / 共896页

Who gave them out, whence they last came, where they began,

through what agency they crookedly quivered and jerked, scores at

a time, over the heads of the crowd, like a kind of lightning, no

eye in the throng could have told; but, muskets were being

distributed--so were cartridges, powder, and ball, bars of iron

and wood, knives, axes, pikes, every weapon that distracted

ingenuity could discover or devise. People who could lay hold of

nothing else, set themselves with bleeding hands to force stones

and bricks out of their places in walls. Every pulse and heart in

Saint Antoine was on high-fever strain and at high-fever heat.

Every living creature there held life as of no account, and was

demented with a passionate readiness to sacrifice it.