D'Artagnan, the King Maker — page 59: what you’re looking at

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

50 The Petrel. “Why, sir, the quadrilleros (squad captains) of the Bishop of St. Sebastian, the governor’s soldiers, the Holy Brotherhood’s familiars, and his majesty’s fiscal officers Whereupon, curbing her flow of vituperative caustic, after consigning all these “landsharks’’ under one head to a sea of fire eternal, she related Salina’s destruction, calling all the saints, martyrs and holy days to witness her truth. To her, it had been a miniature Tyre. Her listener was sympathetic, engrossed in ‘her narra- tion of the doleful fate. “Bad, by the Sacred Writ!” said he; “but, natheless, they must have left something!” “Go, pry in the sea where the sharks swarm—do they leave you any bones?” “But they are not heathens to burn an inn! They, who do not spare wine, do not smash the flagon! It is of old written that he who soils the dish he ate of is ac- cursed thrice!” At this period, when home life was a garrison ex- istence, the family head a dictator, the children slightly superior to the servants, and’the menials slaves, to ruin a hostelry was akin to demolishing a sanctuary! Even an A’ Becket could not always find an inviolate sanctuary, but everybody found an inn, that temple of equality (pro- vided there was a purse). “What have they done with the master? Had he no servants?” — “Oh, there was master enough! but Pedro Bitts and the boys were away fishing—or they would have had a word to say, with points between the words, forsooth! And his cook, the blackamoor, Quaqua, she was over the ridge, too—or she would have pretty soon thrust a hot poker into a cask of Schiedam and blown up the myrmi- dons!” “They seem to have chosen their time of descent well!” “Still, they did not get everything! We plucked the Black Petrel, and put everything worth keeping in that hole up there.” Her stock of verbiage exhausted, she, for the first time, perceived that she was addressing a Jew. Convert, or pervert, or revert, or primitive, this matters not—he (E(O CORNICE OOO KS