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Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

anybody’s life, footsteps not easily made clean again if once

stained red, the footsteps raging in Saint Antoine afar off, as the

little circle sat in the dark London window.

Saint Antoine had been, that morning, a vast dusky mass of

scarecrows heaving to and fro, with frequent gleams of light above

the billowy heads, where steel blades and bayonets shone in the

sun. A tremendous roar arose from the throat of Saint Antoine,

and a forest of naked arms struggled in the air like shrivelled

branches of trees in a winter wind; all the fingers convulsively

clutching at every weapon or semblance of a weapon that was

thrown up from the depths below, no matter how far off.

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

distributedso 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