A carpenter, hearing her terrified exclamations, put on his sabots also, stooped whimpering to the stream running from the Rue d'Egypte, and began to wash his face.

A dozen of his neighbours did the same.

Some of the women, however, went on knitting hard, as they gabbled prayers and looked at the fast-blackening sun.

Knitting was to Jersey women, like breathing or tale-bearing, life itself.

With their eyes closing upon earth they would have gone on knitting and dropped no stitches.
A dusk came down like that over Pompeii and Herculaneum.