Dead of Night

Then they hatched a plot and before long Basel lost Paracelsus, ostensibly because of the meanness of a wealthy citizen. Paracelsus had sued Canon Lichtenfels for failure to pay him one hundred guldens promised for a cure. The patient had offered only six guldens and the fiery Paracelsus, when the court deliberately handed in a verdict against him, rebuked it in such terms that his life was in imminent danger. In the dead of night, he was persuaded by his friends to leave secretly the city where he had hurled defiance at the pseudo-medicos of the world. 

Those of us who have emerged from the dead of night can break the restrictions of this corrupt society. We can live outside it, and flourish. We can bum your Jovian Bank ration cards and liberate you from the restrictions others impose on you." Her smile tilted towards shy impishness. She held a hand out towards the sensor block, palm open. Her fingers closed into a fist, then parted again. A pile of ice-blue diamonds glittered in her palm, laced with slim platinum chains. 

But what of the ones buried in the ground beneath our feet men and women, soldiers and maidservants, ancient dames and children, and newborn babes barely blessed before they cried their last Their bodies lay there, it was said, awaiting Judgment Day. But perhaps some unquiet souls—unshriven, dead before their time, traduced. . . perhaps such souls did walk abroad on this darkest of dark nights that comes before the dawn of May. 

I have decided to trust what Louis de Bretaylles has told me not only that my sons are dead but as to the manner of their dying. But tonight I do not sleep, or even lie in my bed, though my woman pleads with me till I send her away. I sit at my window with the casement open to whatever bad airs choose to enter it is no matter. I sit and feel the emptiness next to my heart where Antony s ring was hidden until this day, and look through the night at where my boys died, and where they lie. 

Her pain is all over now she leave me last night and she never come back again. I watch with her in there when you come. I watch with her some more when you go then I must tell that she is gone, that she is dead, and they come and take her away, and she threw herself on the floor by the door of her mother s room in a perfect agony of grief. 

Leaving climbers unpruned provides welcome refuge. Many small birds, such as wrens, will hide in thick ivy on cold winter nights. Some owls appreciate tall, ivy-clad trees, and if a few of the branches are decaying, woodpeckers will welcome both the source of food and potential nest sites. Leave dead branches in place if they are not in immediate danger of falling so that they, too, can provide food for insects and shelter for birds. 

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