"Aoooo - whoooo - whupp!" went the
siren. "Wingle - tingle - tink," went the bell.
In her grey frock, palpitating with life, generous of form, olympian and simple, she was in deed the
siren to fascinate that dark navigator, this ruthless lover of the five senses.
"You haven't heard our
sirens sing before?" he said, turning to me with a pleasant smile, and thus we fell into talk of the place and its pleasures.
THE SIRENS, SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS, THE CATTLE OF THE SUN.
First you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them.
These illustrious ladies appeared so lovely on the sign, -- they presented to the astonished eyes such an assemblage of lilies and roses, the enchanting result of the change of style in Pittrino -- they assumed the poses of sirens so Anacreontically -- that the principal echevin, when admitted to view this capital piece in the salle of Cropole, at once declared that these ladies were too handsome, of too animated a beauty, to figure as a sign in the eyes of passers-by.
You must efface either the two sirens or the legend, without which I forbid the exhibition of the sign.
It was for the Mediterranean sailors that fair-haired
sirens sang among the black rocks seething in white foam and mysterious voices spoke in the darkness above the moving wave - voices menacing, seductive, or prophetic, like that voice heard at the beginning of the Christian era by the master of an African vessel in the Gulf of Syrta, whose calm nights are full of strange murmurs and flitting shadows.
His face was shining, his eyes flashing with excitement as he translated into articulate language the speech of the horns and
sirens. "That's a steam-siren a-goin' it over there to the left.
For the most part I escaped wonderfully from these dangers, either by proceeding at once boldly and without deliberation to the goal, as is recommended to those who run the gauntlet, or by keeping my thoughts on high things, like Orpheus, who, "loudly singing the praises of the gods to his lyre, drowned the voices of the
Sirens, and kept out of danger." Sometimes I bolted suddenly, and nobody could tell my whereabouts, for I did not stand much about gracefulness, and never hesitated at a gap in a fence.
The wind rushed into the room, together with the sound of distant wheels, footsteps hurrying along the pavement, and the cries of sirens hooting down the river.
The words seemed to fill the room with an emotion which Katharine connected with the sound of distant wheels, the footsteps hurrying along the pavement, the cries of sirens hooting down the river, the darkness and the wind.