Excerpt from The Queen's Fillet

"What? Can you not hear it, - the rumbling of the earthquake beneath your feet, and the signs in the heavens above your heads? O, blind, and deaf, and foolish! And the storm will break, like the hurricane of fire on Gomorrah, and you will sink beneath it, as the doomed cities sank for ever under the lake of bitumen and sulphur!"

"You are mad, mad, mad! These books have turned your mind. Give them up, Maurice, and get your horse and dogs to-morrow, and go into the forests and the pine-woods, and get back your health of mind and body."

But I tell you 'tis coming, coming, and is at hand - the day of vengeance and retribution. What time is this to think of horses and dogs, when the earth is shaking beneath our feet?"

"You're a dreamer of dreams, Maurice de Brignon, - a seer of visions and a dreamer of dreams! And mark you, that is a dangerous frame of mind for a young man. Chacun a son métier! And the lot of a young man is to mount a horse, not to sit on a tripod, and to look into his lady's eyes, and not into the glass of a clairvoyant."

"It needs no tripod and no glass to see what is at our doors, René, " rejoined his companion moodily. "I hear the falling of the axe, and that most terrible of sounds - the onrushing of a maddened people!"

"You need a doctor, my friend, " said René Pereyra.

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