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Michael's Crag by Grant Allen
Book, page 21 / 92


Mont St. Michel in Normandy; and at Le Puy, in Auvergne, there's a St.
Michael's Rock, and at ever so many other places I can't remember this
minute."

Trevennack was in his element. The question just suited him. He smiled
a curious smile of superior knowledge. "You've come to the right place
for information," he said, blandly, turning round to the engineer.
"I'm a Companion of St. Michael and St. George myself, and my family,
as I told you, once owned St. Michael's Mount; so, for that and
various other reasons, I've made a special study of St. Michael the
Archangel, and all that pertains to him." And then he went on to give
a long and learned disquisition, which Le Neve and Walter Tyrrel only
partially followed, about the connection between St. Michael and the
Celtic race, as well as about the archangel's peculiar love for high
and airy situations. Most of the time, indeed, Le Neve was more
concerned in watching Cleer Trevennack's eyes, as her father spoke,
than in listening to the civil servant's profound dissertation. He
gathered, however, from the part he caught, that St. Michael the
Archangel had been from early days a very important and powerful
Cornish personage, and that he clung to high places on the tors and
rocks because he had to fight and subdue the Prince of the Air, whom
he always destroyed at last on some pointed pinnacle. And now that he
came to think of it, Eustace vaguely recollected he had always seen
St. Michael, in pictures or stained glass windows, delineated just so
--with drawn sword and warrior's mien--in the act of triumphing over
his dragon-like enemy on the airy summit of some tall jagged crag or
rock-bound precipice.

As for Mrs. Trevennack, she watched her husband every moment he spoke
with a close and watchful care, which Le Neve hardly noticed, but
which didn't for a minute escape Walter Tyrrel's more piercing and
observant scrutiny.

At last, as the amateur lecturer was beginning to grow somewhat
prolix, a cormorant below created a slight diversion for awhile by
settling in his flight on the very highest point of Michael's Crag,
and proceeding to preen his glittering feathers in the full golden
flood of that bright August sunlight.

With irrepressible boyish instinct Le Neve took up a stone, and was

 
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