पृष्ठ 621 / 896

Shouldering one another to get next at the sharpening-stone, were

men stripped to the waist, with the stain all over their limbs

and bodies; men in all sorts of rags, with the stain upon those

rags; men devilishly set off with spoils of women's lace and silk

and ribbon, with the stain dyeing those trifles through and

through. Hatchets, knives, bayonets, swords, all brought to be

sharpened, were all red with it. Some of the hacked swords were

tied to the wrists of those who carried them, with strips of

linen and fragments of dress: ligatures various in kind, but all

deep of the one colour. And as the frantic wielders of these

weapons snatched them from the stream of sparks and tore away

into the streets, the same red hue was red in their frenzied

eyes;--eyes which any unbrutalised beholder would have given

twenty years of life, to petrify with a well-directed gun.