OK, are we? Oh, it's working. All right, so we'll go ahead and get started. My name is Robert Tayar. I am a 15-year IT veteran, maybe 20, primarily in networking. We're going to present today as our current server farm topologies, as well as our new CLOS topology. Towards the end, you're going to see some hardcore numbers on VXLAN and EVPN that we did with load generators. I'll start off by covering our requirements and why we went to this topology, because when you go to cloud, you should always ask why. Second person that will be speaking today is Shree, and he'll go through our new security requirements, followed by Jason, who will actually cover those hardcore numbers. First slide, Walmart's big. We're all reminded of this. 2.2 million associates were bigger than some countries. The reason we bring this up is because as a large company, we also have large processes. This is not how long it takes to do new compute anymore. But when I came in five years ago, it was pretty bad. And for the compute, each team had to be hit in order. And I'm not listing all of the teams, but suffice to say, it could be six months, sometimes a year, before you actually got the compute on the floor. Why? As you hit each team, we had processes. There are typical processes you see in a Fortune 500. You have a security review. You have to get on to the facilities floor, change controls, clarity, and I'm not listing all of the processes. But for every process, every single team had to iterate that process. So you had engineers that were working extremely hard, extremely talented engineers that were buried in process. So why did we go cloud? It had as much to do with process as it did with tech. Our current server farms, traditional core distribution access model. For the past 15 years, as far back as I can remember, this is what network engineers design towards. I'm going to bet most of you have the same type of topology somewhere in your data centers.  Sorry. Chubin Resource Intensive at every point the foe. Can you do this? I know. It's gone crazy. I told you, manual. Yeah, let me just stick to it. I'm sorry, guys. OK. So Chubin Resource Intensive, it's kind of a bad diagram. But bottom line is we had to engage a team for the firewall rules, another team for the network services, another team for the network, and a completely different team for the servers. And you had to follow the same process as I showed you on the previous slide. So even turning up a new network was resource intensive. All of the engineers want layer three, because we don't like spanning tree issues. And all of the application folks and server folks would layer two for clustering. We can't agree on anything. It was approximately 1.1 million before you could put the first compute in the topology. And it took forever to put the first topology in. And large spanning tree domains, which will be a theme on the next slides. Go ahead and click it. Engineers and the business didn't exactly have the same requirements. And I'm not going to go through all of these, but there are a couple of themes. Our theme is we needed to stop outages. We needed to stop human error. A lot of it had to do with spanning tree. And we had new security requirements. We had to build dedicated infrastructure for PCI and other types of security. And so we would literally put firewalls at the top of the rack, very expensive, overbuilt. And you had to do it every time you wanted to have a security domain. Go ahead and click. So why CLOS? Well, it's very deterministic. No matter where you are in the CLOS topology, you're three hops. In that traditional 752 model, if I wanted to cover across an L3 boundary, you had to go up to the distribution switch. Just a lot of hops. And we had problems with organic growth. In other words, the business would come to the engineers, whether it's on the West Coast or the East Coast or in Bentonville. And they would say, I want computing. I want compute right now. And we would rush to get the computing before lockdown in October. And layer two might have gotten a little out of control as we were trying to turn it up quickly. So with a CLOS fabric, it's three hops anywhere. There are no snowflakes. We are using the same access cabinets, whether it's Cassandra, Ceph, General Compute, name your workload, same top of racks. It's the same. I can go 12,000. I think it's on the next slide. A lot of ports. I can scale insanely wide. Our current high-level topology, we use OSPF strictly to learn the endpoints. It is our underlay. That's what I'm responsible for. We have two very talented engineers. One couldn't be here today named Daniel Justice and Pavan, who's somewhere in the audience. We are at about 90% on no touch. I don't touch the switches anymore. I'm getting rusty. The underlay is completely auto-deployed. We pixie-boot the switches up. He auto-carves the addressing, and it applies it to the config. Even the Slash 31s that are in this topology are automated. PCI has to traverse the distribution layer between the internal and the external border leaves. MPBGP is what we use for a control plane. The VXLAN standard does not dictate a particular control plane. We could have used multicast. We preferred BGP because most network engineers know BGP. It's a standard table. Much easier to troubleshoot. He'll go back one more real quick, and I'll wrap up. 12,288 compute ports, 12 open stack fault domains. All of the L2 and the L3 terminates in the top of rack. I'm going to go and pass it over to Shree, who's going to focus in on the security requirements, and then we'll get to the performance numbers. Thank you, Bobby. So today I'm going to be covering some of our security opportunities and challenges that we faced at Walmart and how we tried to solve them in this iteration of our clause design. So at any big company, there's two competing priorities. You want your developers to be able to move fast, be able to do services and deploy applications into production quickly. But on the other hand, you also want to have some sort of governance and process around things getting to production, especially our insecurity. So prior to this, most of the workloads were being handled through physical buildouts, which are slow and process driven. With the new design, we're hoping to ease some of that pain and build security into the deployment process itself. So one of the first things we kind of settled on was we're going to run multiple security tiers or application tiers on the same physical infrastructure similar to how public clouds run it. You go to Azure. You can run all your workloads on Azure, but you don't have different clouds for your PCI workloads or management workloads versus web tier. The other requirement was to enable fine grained access controls between applications and services. The third one was to bake that security process into the application lifecycle. We're not going to touch on this a lot today, but if you want to talk about it, we can do it after the talk. We have an open source tool called OneOps that we use to control some of this policy. The last two is to enable our security team to have visibility into the cloud and see what's happening and have some sort of control on who can change policy and having the right review for policy changes. So before I get into design and the solution, we're using VRFs to do core segmentation between our security tiers. And for people who are not familiar with what a VRF is, here's the Wikipedia definition. I'm not going to read it, but at a high level, from a network point of view, it's a different routing cable running within the same physical router. And for people who are more familiar with Linux, think of it as a Linux namespace where you have a different network stack to handle different tiers or applications. So one of the first requirements was to be able to do network segmentation between applications and having to do fine-grained controls between apps. So before we get to that, I'm going to, hopefully that's the diagram is a little bit clear on the big screen. We're using VRF as a security boundary. So we have multiple VRFs based on our security tiers. We might have a VRF for PCI. We would have a VRF for our management traffic. We might have a VRF for internal traffic and then another VRF for handling web tier or application traffic, which doesn't need a whole lot of security around it. And the reason we did this was to leverage the same network infrastructure, but do different things based on security policy. So for instance, the PCI VRF can send traffic out to a firewall or idea system and a security stack, which is needed to handle that sort of data classification or security tier. We are mostly using stock neutron with provider and tenant networks and mapping each of those provider networks to one of those worms. It's a one-to-one mapping provider network or tenant or a VLAN maps to one of those security tiers. So like a PCI workload would be on a provider VLAN, and that VLAN could be shared between tenants at the same security level. The three options that we enable our users to use to do that fine-grained access controls is using the physical firewalls up there. That's done for the most secure workloads where we might need a web application firewall, an IDS IPS system, and additional firewall functionality, which is not within OpenStack itself. The second option is to be able to use security groups within OpenStack to do fine-grained controls. I'm going to talk a little bit later on the challenges of using security groups and the issues that are trying to do cross region or cross tenant access controls. And the last solution that we can use is host-based or agent-based controls. With this, I mean, you could use something as simple as Chef or Puppet to control IP tables on the box, or you can use agent-based.  So some of the challenges that we face in this environment, because it's an ephemeral cloud environment, IPs, keeping track of which IP falls into which security tier is difficult. The information is available to you, but there's no good tool to tie this across all of our regions, across all of our clouds, across bare metal. So that's one of the challenges that we face, where within a single OpenStack region, you can do fine-grained access controls. But as soon as you try going across regions, you need something to tie IP to security tier across regions. And right now, we're still exploring a couple of options there. The other issues, all of these are under unmanageability around multiple regions and having a centralized view of your infrastructure for security, not having visibility of what traffic flows between your instances or containers across regions. Within a single region, you have that visibility. You can enable some functionality within OpenStack to log drops and feed that into your infosec system. And the last one is being able to audit policy across your infrastructure. Right now, it's a little painful to actually do that and have a centralized view across all of your OpenStack regions. Things we hope solve some of our pain points are firewall as a service. Right now, it's not production ready. I believe the last one was marked as the APIs being redone. And we hope it's something that we can leverage in the future. Another big thing is our security team needs to be able to tap and see what traffic is flowing in and out of VMs or containers. We've been following Tap as a Service for a while now. I think a couple summits, presentations are on Tap as a Service, but it's still not something which is an upstream neutron as yet. And the last one is actually being able to virtualize our entire security stack, being able to kind of have a policy around deployment and having that all virtualized with VNFs and orchestrated using OpenStack itself. So now I'm going to hand it over to Jason to go over more of the details on our design. Yep, so I'm going to talk mostly from a neutron perspective and how we tied in BGP, EVPN, into neutron. And I think the important aspect is we got to understand there was a pretty aggressive timeline with the solution. And as Bobby hit on earlier, we had a lot of Layer 2 issues. And our number one goal was to solve those issues. And so we wanted something that had great performance at scales. Being Walmart, any solution we deploy has to be highly scalable. And then also something that we could quickly deploy to fix the issues that were touched on earlier. And for that, we're leveraging MP, BGP, EVPN. Operationally, it was very easy to integrate. We already have the top of rack switches. Everything's monitored. From a neutron perspective, we're already using Linux Bridge. So being able to abstract, not adding all the complexity with OVS and neutron allowed us to build the solution and actually get it deployed quickly. So this is just a high level overview of what an open stack region looks like. As you can see, we're terminating Layer 2 at each top of rack switch. And then we're extending the provider networks with EVPN across multiple racks. And like I said earlier, just neutron is this plumbing in provider network through Linux Bridge. So this is more of a detailed view of how the compute node and how a VLAN that we tag down from the top of rack switch, how it actually maps into our EVPN in the top of rack and how the hardware VTEP will route out the traffic. So I'm just going to go through each of the steps. So on the compute node, we have an instance which is plumbed into the Linux Bridge, which is the QBR Bridge. And then we have a VLAN sub-interface, which maps to a specific provider network. And now that provider network will map into a tenant VIRF. And so if we wanted to, let's say, launch an instance in the PCI zone, we would just associate it with the provider network that's in the PCI VIRF. And then once it hits into the top of rack switch, we're associated in VLAN, in this case, 1301 to VNI 5001. And as you can see, it lives in a specific VIRF. And then from there, it'll hit the VTEP. And the VTEP will either do bridging, layer 2 bridging, if it's going to another endpoint in the same logical network, or if it's going to a different VNI, it'll then do L3 VXLAN routing. So I touched on this earlier. We wanted to move fast. There's a lot of different solutions that we're looking at longer term. So do application-driven and then integrating OpenStack via the ML2 plugin. But for this, it was just a quick win that we could use to solve our existing issues and operational challenges. And one of the nice things with this solution, we get high performance. And I'm going to go into detailed benchmark showing what kind of performance you could expect to go into this model. And also the distributed routing. So we looked at the DVR solution in Neutron. And that adds significant complexity, especially for our compute team to manage. So by leveraging this model, we keep all the networking guys doing the networking. And then on the compute side, they just have to worry about Linux Ridge. So just an overview of our test setup that we've conducted the testing with. We used the standard HP DL360 servers, 512 gig of memory. This is just our typical hypervisor configuration. And then for the networking, we used the Cisco 92160 top of rack switches. Each compute node is connected to the top of rack with 10 gig of it links. And then each of the top of racks do ECMP up to two spines at 40 gig. So all tests were done on Ubuntu 14.04. And then just describing the specific tests. So we did a couple of tests. One was TCP, UDP test at varying packet sizes. We wanted to measure the performance for small packet sizes and also at large. For latency test, used net perf. So did a TCP request response test. So to measure how many transactions per second we could do, so the higher the better. And then also wanted to stress the scale of the fabric. So we wrote a couple of custom Python scripts that just basically does an ARP and sends an ICMP packet. And that'll generate thousands and thousands. They'll simulate thousands and thousands of endpoints to see how the performance is with large table sizes. So a couple of the performance tests we did. One was the L2-VX LAN. So what's the performance within a logical network? Then also L3-VX LAN, so routing across different VNI's. And then the final test was to measure the performance from one verve to another verve in the same fabric. And also as a stress test, we used an application mix that simulated 5,000 unique flows with the varying different types of traffic that you would commonly find. SMTP, RDBMS, HTVS, BitTorrent. And that was transferring at around 50 gigabits per second while I conducted all of the L2-VX LAN, L3-VX LAN and interverve tests. So that was to see if load on the fabric had any impact on performance. And then finally was the 50k table size test using the custom Python scripts. And also wanted to see if that had any impact. So this is just a overview of each of the tests. You could see that all the tests were conducted across two endpoints that were connected to two different top of rack switches. So three hops away with the exception of the verve test. The verve test actually has to go up to the external border leaf because that's where we're actually terminating all the verves. And that's where the firewall and security stacks for cross-verve traffic. So right between the internal border leaf and external border leaf, that's where all the security devices will live so we could apply policy across verves and zones. And so also to start the benchmark for the Layer 2 performance, the first thing I wanted to do was to determine what's the baseline performance of the top of rack switch with just a simple VLAN and then two compute nodes connected to that same top of rack switch, so one switch hop. And as you see on the throughput L2 test, when it says L2, that's basically the baseline test. That's one hop. And then next to it, you have the Layer 2 VXLAN test. And that one is measuring three. That one's going three hops, so it's going tour, spine, tour. So there is a little latency introduced because we're going through more devices. But on the throughput test, you could see there's the percent decrease so that basically measures, was there a performance decrease? And if it's positive, there was, but if it was negative, then it actually was slightly faster. And as you could see, the max out of all the tests at different packet sizes, both with TCP and UDP, the most was 2%. And that could just be accounted to the variation between tests. So the variation was about 3% to 5% during each test run. And then on the latency, you could see that the highest was 10% at small packet sizes. So that's the TCP Request Response Test. And the main reason for that, I associate to the additional networking hops. And then on the right side, this is where you could actually see the impact that the table size of 50,000 endpoints or the application mix would have on the test. So while we were doing the performance test, we had two bare metal endpoints that were transmitted in traffic between each other. And then we had several other bare metal hosts generating the Atmix traffic and also simulating the large table sizes. So the systems under test were not running the Atmix. And as you could see, there was really no performance difference, both for throughput and latency. For the Layer 3 performance, it was basically, so the Layer 3 performance is measuring the difference between the Layer 2 VX LAN and then the Layer 3 Routed VX LAN performance. So you're routing across different VNIs. And as you could see, there is no delta. I mean, right here, we're at like 0%. So we're running, essentially, a line rate with VX LAN because the VX LAN is offloaded in the top of rock switch. And also, application mix and then the large table sizes didn't have any impact on performance. And the final test was the inner-verf test. So measuring the performance and even that, there was no drop in throughput. The only thing that increased was the latency. And that could be a result of going through additional network hops, because as I showed before, it has to go all the way up to the border leaf. So in summary, so this solution with Linux Prygine using MPBGP and VX LAN offloaded performs very similar to bare metal speeds. So there was no noticeable performance decrease. And we know it scales to at least 50,000 endpoints. At one point, we even had 90,000 MAC addresses into the fabric. And there was no noticeable issue. And everything kept running and working. So with that, I'm going to lead into questions. So first off, this is probably one of the best use case sessions I've been to all week. So thank you for that. First off, on the testing, did you do testing between VMs either in the same tenant or between tenants on a single physical server and look at the load and latency testing there as well? So for all the testing, so one of the goals was to measure the performance of the fabric itself. And so I wanted to eliminate as much in the data path as possible, because we're using Linux Bridge today. We already know the performance of it. It's already tested. So all the tests were on bare metal servers with 802.1.Q interfaces. And then I would run the test between the two endpoints of the two bare metal hosts that would live in two different racks with two different top of racks, which is. There was one point of clarification. I think it was stated that the verse lived up on the external border leafs. If we go up to, what is it with me in this thing? To the external border leafs, that would be the switches at the very top. The fabric actually ends at the internal border leafs. And we're playing a little old network trick, because I'm an old grizzly network guy. And we worked with our vendor. And we're actually trunking across all verfs up to the external border leaf. So the external border leaf is not verf-aware, right? The fabric actually ends at the internal border leaf. That's just a layer three hop. So it's trunked through the firewall, layer three out. Thank you. Question over here on this mic. Can you talk a little bit about failure modes, resiliency, any testing you've done there, maybe on the BGP part in particular? No, we ran out of time. That's probably the next thing that Jason and I have to test. I can tell you we've had, we have tested some failures, but I'd rather not go into it until we have XE up and running, and I can give you some hardcore bench numbers. So yeah, that's what we're at. That's the next testing we do. I have a question that, in your design, there should be a steam controller or a switch manager in the fabric, right? Yeah, so there's that. So when you talk a controller, you mean in like the neutron is talking to as a plug-in? But as far as I know, a neutral plug-in cannot talk to the switches and tell the switch, you need a wharf, you need a bridge domain or something. Yeah, so for that, so actually too. So that's a good question. So to add, let's say, a new ver for provision, a new VLAN that's mapped to a VNI, we were initially leveraging Cisco VTS, which will actually talk to all of the top of rack and border leaf switches. So we just go in there and we'll add a new provider network, say it's associated to this ver, and it'll just pull from a VLAN pole that we specified and it'll provision across. And I guess for future, we're looking at moving all of that configuration and automation with Ansible. So every time we want to add a new ver for, we want to add a new private logical network, we'll just use Ansible. And then longer term is move into a controller model. OK, I have heard of VTS and therefore the other question that you have showed the test result of the data plan and performance. But if you introduce a new testing controller, there is a biggest problem is the control plan performance. Since you have 2DB, right? OpenStack database and the VTS database, there must be some problem like the database may be not inconsistent or the transaction may be not going right like this. No, so as a clarification, we're a very large company. And so we have to contend with a lot of different type of workloads. So the one thing that we are working on as a controller, we are not using VTS the way VTS was intended to be used. We're kind of beating up our vendor to make it work how we want it to. And they've been very phenomenal about working with us. We're using it as configuration management only, right? It's literally just pushing out, here's the VLAN in the appropriate VIRF. If I personally have to figure out what VLAN goes and what VIRF very quickly, it can get very cluged in the config if you do it by hand. So it's just a way to automate the configs. OK, thank you. Question about how you guys are spanning VLANs using VXLAN across different racks. Are you doing anything to egress locally from a rack which does not have the default gateway pinned down on it? Explain a little bit further, I'm sorry. So you guys are taking a provider network VLAN and putting it across multiple fanouts, right? Those fanouts are top of the racks are going to be your L2 or L3 terminations. Well, you're talking about just a straight up Layer 2 VLAN, like a cluster VLAN? Yeah. Yeah, we do it. There's no difference. We either make it an SVI or we don't. So the internal border leaf either has an SVI for it. If it doesn't, the Layer 2 stays local. So yes, those numbers that he was testing for like the L2, that was just a VLAN with no SVI. So the SVIs are all the way up on the internal border leaves for the provider networks? Yes. Well, I was going to. So we're using the distributed anycast router function. So the SVIs, they really live in every top of rack as well. So hello? Yeah. So I wanted to ask the question is not more on the technology side. And I think I heard this correct, is that you guys were on L2 topology. And so what was the change that you guys had to undergo from an architecture and operations team to go directly to MPBGP, EVPM? And I'll ask the second question after this. That's what we're about to find. And the second question is I think the gentleman out there already answered is right now it's not controlled by OpenStack. So there's nobody from your app developer team talking to Neutron plug-in into some SDN controller that will control this. Or do workloads requests come in through some zero ticket and then somebody does something about it? Yeah. So right now we have a abstraction layer above our OpenStack regions. It's called OneOps. So once we provision a new provider network in our fabric here, we could orchestrate it to add it in the OneOps. And then OneOps will actually talk to OpenStack and actually provision the instances. And we are currently not doing this by hand. So VTS has APIs. So if I've got to push a new network, we've already scripted it. Everything that you see that we're doing is completely scripted. We need to clean it up. The two engineers I spoke about, Pavan and Daniel, that's what we have them working on. So we'll have more good stuff at the next OpenStack. So the request would be still coming in from your app team to somebody. And that somebody will then do executions of scripts, correct? Wow. Not quite, right? So we're going to have different V lines or whatever, right? Different security tiers. And then within our PAS platform, tenants can be mapped to, like you matched this PCI tenant. And then you are automatically going to launch. The past year is automatically going to launch your instances on the right network. But like he said, like all of that, the automation around building those V lines and tying them to works is handled through the physical layer. That we're going to know ahead of time, in terms of when do we need it? Are we running out of space? Do we need more? And then that's done by the underlay team. And then once our PAS platform has the information, it's heading from the customers. They just launch instances. And it happens to happen on the right network. Thank you. Hi. I've got three questions. The first one was with regards to Linux Bridge and the decision to go to Linux Bridge instead of LVS. And the second question was with regards to latency, what was your test environment for that? How did you measure latency? And the third question was related to packet loss. With your traffic generation, when you're going through the architecture, whether it's north, south, or east through west, how are you measuring that? All right. So the first one, so why did we choose Linux Bridge? So we're deployed on the Liberty release of OpenStack. And one of the things, we already use Linux Bridge. So everyone's comfortable with it. It's proven in production. And then also OVS, it's fixed now. But whenever you restart a Dell 2 agent, it would drop all your flows when you're leveraging a provider network. But that's from my understanding, we're now resolved in Metaca. But we're still on the Liberty release. And then on the second one for how do we measure the latency? So that was, we used Netperf. It's an open source benchmarking tool. So just simple doing a simple TCP request response test between two bare metal endpoints. So one was running the Netperf server, and another was the client. And it just measured the time for a request to go from client to server, and then server to client back. So the more transactions per second, it actually meant the latency on that test was lower. So the higher numbers on that one were actually better. And then what was the third question? The packet loss. Yeah, so for the TCP throughput test, there was no packet loss on those, because we're using it. Because it is using the TCP window. But for the UDP test, that's probably the one you're mainly referring to. When we were running the test, the packet loss was minimal. It was about 1% to 5% is what I was seeing. And the goal of the UDP test was, it really does us to see, hey, how much bandwidth can I throw through the pipe? And how does that compare to the Layer 2 baseline test? And for the UDP traffic, I didn't notice a difference from the Layer 2 without VX LAN test to the Layer 2 VX LAN test, and then the Layer 3 VX LAN test. So it was consistent across all the tests. I had, sorry, just one more question. On the spine and the leafs, it was at all white box, and were you running? We were going to test other topologies. This was the first one that we tested. We have a pretty big partnership with a vendor that supports all of our stores, and we saw how many stores we have. So that was 9,508 Cisco for the spines, and those were 92, 160s brand new switches. They have one, 10, and 25 gig all servers, and 40 and 100 gig native uplinks. So pretty beefy switches perform very well. But we are also looking at Arista, and we're also looking at Cumulus. So the same testing that you see, we're doing that in our lab. Literally, like next week. Are your next plans to start looking at network monitoring and visibility? That's a huge topic. That's a great question, and the answer is yes. Thank you. Actually, I'll add on to that. We do remember we're very much of an enterprise, so we've been using HP, NNMI, StatSeeker, and we realized that we needed to look at some open systems. And our other org, our compatriots on the West Coast, I wish we'd had one of them up here to answer that question. Maybe we could answer it after this. But yes, there are a lot of open systems, a lot of network management. It's very impressive. Right, we're out of time, folks. Thank you for coming. Thank you.


Section 14 of Castles in the Air This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, reading by Lars Rolander. Castles in the Air by Baroness Emusca Orksi, Chapter 7 An Oversensitive Heart, Part 1 No doubt, sir, that you have noticed during the course of our conversations, that nature has endowed me with an oversensitive heart. I feel keenly, sir, very keenly. Blows dealt me by fate, or, as has been more often the case, by the cruel and teacher's hand of man, touch me on the raw. I suffer acutely. I am highly strung. I am one of those rare beings whom nature preordained for love and for happiness. I am an ideal family man. What? You did not know that I was married? Indeed, sir, I am. And though Madame Ratishong does not perhaps fulfil all my ideals of exquisite womanhood, nevertheless she has been an able and willing help-maker during these last years of comparative prosperity. Yes, you see me fairly prosperous now. My industry, my genius, if I may so express myself, found their reward at last.  I worked for it, toiled, and thought, and struggled, up to the last, and had fate been just rather than grudging, I should have attained that ideal which would have filled my cup of happiness to the brim. But anyway, the episode connected with my marriage did mark the close of my professional career, and is therefore worthy of record. Since that day, sir, a happy one for me, a blissful one for Madame Ratishong. I have been able, thanks to the foresight of an all-wise providence, to gratify my bucolic tastes. I live now, sir, amidst my flowers, with my dog and my canary and Madame Ratishong, smiling with kindly indulgence on the struggles and the blunders of my younger colleagues, oft consulted by them in matters that require special tact and discretion. I sit and dream now beneath the shade of a vine-clad arbor of those glorious days of long ago, when kings and emperors placed the destiny of their inheritance in my hands, when autocrats and dictators came to me for assistance and advice, and the name of Hector Ratishong stood for everything that was most astute and most discreet, and if at times a gentle sigh of regret escapes my lips, Madame Ratishong, whose thinness is ever my despair, for I admire comeliness, sir, as being more womanly. Madame Ratishong, I say, comes to me with the gladsome news that dinner is served, and though she is not all that I could wish in the matter of the culinary arts, yet she can fry a cutlet possibly, and one of her brothers is a wholesale wine merchant of excellent reputation. It was soon after my connection with that abominable Marquis de Faman Latour that I first made the acquaintance of the present Madame Ratishong under somewhat peculiar circumstances. I remember it was on the first day of April, in the year 1817, that Monsieur Rocher, Fernand Rocher, was his exact name, came to see me at my office in the Rue du Nord, and the date proved propitious as you will presently see. How Monsieur Rocher came to know of my gifts and powers I cannot tell you, he never would say. He had heard of me through a friend, was all that he vouched safe to say. Theodore had shown him in, ah, have I not mentioned the fact that I had forgiven Theodore his lies and his treachery, and taking him back to my bosom and to my board? My sensitive heart had again got the better of my prudence, and Theodore was installed once more in the antechamber of my apartments in the Rue du Nord, and was as here to foresharing with me all the good things that I could afford. So there he was on duty on that fateful first of April, which was destined to be the turning point of my destiny, and he showed Monsieur de Rocher in. At once I knew my man, the type, I mean, immaculately dressed, scented and befriiled, haughty of manner and nonchalant of speech.  He was young, good-looking, his nails were beautifully polished, his pantaloons fitted him without a wrinkle, these were of a soft potty shade, his coat was bottle-green, and his hat of the latest modish shape, a perfect exquisite in fact. And he came to the point without much preamble. Monsieur Ratichon, he said, I have heard of you through a friend who tells me that you are the most unscrupulous scoundrel he has ever come across. Sir, I began, rising from my seat in indignant protest, at the core's insult, but with an authoritative gesture he checked the flow of my indignation. No comedy, I pray, you sir, he said, we are not at the theatre-molière, but I presume in an office where business is transacted both briefly and with discretion. At your service, monsieur, I replied. Then listen, will you, he went on curtly, and pray do not interrupt, only speak in answer to a question from me. I bowed my head in silence. Thus must the crowds suffer when they happen to be sparsely endowed with riches. You have no doubt heard of mademoiselle Goldberg, Monsieur Rocher continued after moments' pause, the lovely daughter of the rich usur in the Rue de Medecin. I had heard of mademoiselle Goldberg, but the beauty and her father's wealth were reported to be fabulous. I indicated my knowledge of the beautiful lady by a mute inclination of the head. I love mademoiselle Goldberg, my client resumed, and I have reason for the belief that I am not altogether indifferent to her. Glances, you understand, from the eyes as expressive as those of the exquisite duos, speak more eloquently than words. He had forbidden me to speak, so I could only express concurrence in the sentiments which he expressed by slight elevation of my left eyebrow. I am determined to win the affections of mademoiselle Goldberg. Monsieur Rocher went on glibly, and equally I am determined to make her my wife. A very natural determination, I remarked involuntarily. My only trouble with regard to pressing my call is the fact that my lovely Leah is never allowed outside her father's house, save in his company or that of his sister. An old maid of dharmium and sar disposition who acts the part of duena with dog-like tenacity. Over and over again I have tried to approach the lady of my heart, only to be repelled or roughly rebuked for my insolence by her irascible old arms. You are not the first lover, sir, I remarked dryly, who hath seen obstacles thus thrown in his way, and one moment, Monsieur Rattichant, he broke in sharply. I have not finished, I will not attempt to describe my feelings to you. I have been breathing, yes, breathing in face of those obstacles of which you speak so lightly, and for a long time I have been cuddling my brains as to the possible means whereby I might approach my divinity unchecked. Then one day I bethought me of you. Of me, sir? I ejaculated sorely possibly. Why of me? None of my friends, he replied nonchalantly, would care to undertake so scrubby task as I would assign to you. I pray you to be more explicit, I retorted with unimpaired dignity. Once more he paused, obviously he was a born mount-bank, and he calculated all his effects to a nicety. You, Monsieur Rattichant, he said curtly at last, will have to take the duena of my hands. I was beginning to understand, so I let him prattle on the while my busy brain was already at work, evolving the means to render this man's service, which in its turn I expected to be amply repaid. Thus I cannot repeat exactly all that he said, for I was only listening with half an ear. But the substance of it all was this. I was to pose as the friend of Monsieur Fernand Rocher, and engage the tension of Mademoiselle Goldberg Sr., the while he paid his court to the lovely Léa. It was not a repellent task altogether. The course Monsieur Rocher's suggestion opened a vista of pleasant parties at open-air cafes, with foaming tankards so bare on warm afternoons, the while the young people sipped syrups and fed on love. My newly found friend was pleased to admit that my personality and appearance would render my courtship of the elderly duena a comparatively easy one. She would soon, he declared, fall a victim to my charms, after which the question of remuneration came in, and over this we did not altogether agree. Ultimately I decided to accept an advance of 200 francs and a new suit of clothes, which I at once declared was indispensable under the circumstances, seeing that in my well-worn coat I might have the appearance of a fortune-hunter in the eyes of the suspicious old dame. Within my mind I envisaged the possibility of touching Monsieur Rocher for a further 200 francs if and when opportunity arose. The formal introduction took place on the boulevards on a fine afternoon shortly after that Mademoiselle Lea was walking under the trees with her duena when we, Monsieur Rocher and I came face to face with him. My friend raised his hat and I did likewise. Mademoiselle Lea blushed and the auger frowned. Sir, she was an auger, bony and angular and hook-nosed, with thin lips that closed with a snap cold grey eyes that sent a shiver down your spine. Rocher introduced me to her and I made myself exceedingly agreeable to her while my friend succeeded in exchanging two or three whispered words with his enamoratam. But we did not get very far that day. Mademoiselle Goldberg Sr. soon marched her lovely charge away. Ah, sir, she was lovely indeed, and in my heart I not only envied Rocher his good fortune, but I also felt how entirely unworthy he was of it. Nor did the beautiful Lea give me the impression of being quite so deeply struck with his charms as he would have had me believe. Indeed it struck me during those few minutes that I stood dutifully talking to her duena that the fair young Jewish cast more than one approving glance in my direction. Be that as it may, the progress of our respective courtships, now that their eyes was broken, took on a more decided turn. At first it only amounted to meetings on the boulevards and a cursory greeting. But soon Mademoiselle Goldberg Sr. delighted with my conversation would deliberately turn to walk with me under the trees the while Fernand Rocher followed by the side of his adored. A week later the ladies accepted my friend's offer to sit under the awning of the café Bourbon and to sip syrups whilst we indulged in tankers of foaming blondes. Within a fortnight, sir, I may say it without posting, I had Mademoiselle Goldberg Sr. in the hollow of my hand. On the boulevards as soon as she caught sight of me her dour face would be red in smiles. A row of large yellow teeth would appear between her thin lips and her cold grey eyes would soften with a glance of welcome which more than ever sent a cold shudder down my spine. While we four were together, either promenading or sitting at open-air cafés in the cool of the evening, the old duena had eyes and ears only for me and if my friend Rocher did not get on with his own courtship as fast as he would have wished, the fault rested entirely with him for he did not get on with his courtship and that was a fact. The fair Lea was very sweet, very coy, greatly amused. I fancy at her ounce obvious infatuation for me and not a little flattered at the handsome Mr. Rocher's attention to herself but there it all ended and whenever I questioned Rocher on the subject he flew into a temper and consigned all middle-aged USS to perdition and all the lovely and young ones to a comfortable kind of hardest to which he alone amongst the male sex would have excess from which I gathered that I was not wrong in my surmises that the fair Lea had been smitten by my personality and my appearance rather than by those of my friend and that he was suffering the pangs of an insane jealousy. This of course he never would admit all that he told me one day was that Lea with the characteristic timidity of her race refused to marry him unless she could obtain her father's consent to the junior. Old Goldberg duly approached on the matter flatly forbade his daughter to have anything further to do with that fortune-hunter, that parasite, that beggarly pick-thang. Such, sir, were but a few complimentary epithets which he hurled with great valubility at his daughter's absent suitor. It was from Mademoiselle Goldberg's senior that my friend and I had the details of that stormy interview between father and daughter after which she declared that interviews between the lovers would necessarily become very difficult of an arrangement. From which you will gather that the worthy soul, though she was as ugly as sin, was by this time on the side of the angels. Indeed, she was more than that. She professed herself willing to aid and abet them in every way she could. This Rocher confided to me, together with his assurance that he was determined to take his fate into his own hands and, since the beautiful Leah would not come to him of her own accord to carrier off by force. Ah, my dear sir, those were romantic days, you must remember, days when men placed the possession of the woman they loved above every treasure, every consideration upon earth. Ah, Romans! Romans, sir, was the breath of our nostrils, the blood in our veins. Imagine how readily we all fell in with my friend's plans. I, of course, was the moving spirit in it all. Mine was the genius which was destined to turn the gilded romance into grim reality. Yes, grim, for you shall see. Mademoiselle Goldberg's senior, who appropriately enough was named Sarah, gave us the clue how to proceed after which my genius worked. You must know that old Goldberg's house in the Rue de Medecin, a large apartment house in which he occupied a few rooms on the ground floor behind his shop, backed on to a small uncultivated garden which ended in a tall brick wall, the meeting place of all the felins in the neighborhood, and in which there was a small post-ungate now desused. This gate gave on a narrow cul-de-sac, grand eloquently named Passage-Connaix, which was flanked on the opposite side by the tall boundary wall of an adjacent convent. That cul-de-sac was marked out from the very first in my mind as our objective. Around and about it, as it were, did I build the edifice of my schemes, aided by the ever-willing Sarah.  We were now in mid-May and enjoying a spell of hot summer weather. This gave the inventive Sarah the excuse for using the back garden as a place wherein to sit in the cool of the evening in the company of her niece. Ah, you see the whole thing now at a glance, do you not? The post-ungate, the murky night, the daring lover, the struggling maiden, the willing accomplices, the actors were all there, ready for the curtain to be rung up on the palpitating drama. Then it was that a brilliant idea came into my brain. It was born on the very day that I realized with indisputable certainty that the lovely Leah was not in reality in love with Rocher. He faciously believed that she was ready to fall into his arms, that only maidenly timidity held her back, and that the moment she had been snatched from her father's house and found herself in the arms of her adoring lover, she would turn to him in the very fullness of love and confidence. But I knew better. I had caught a look now and again, an undefinable glance which told me the whole pitiful tale. She did not love Rocher, and in the drama which we were preparing to enact the curtain would fall on its rapture and her unhappiness. Ah, sir, imagine what my feelings were when I realized this. This fair girl against whom we were all conspiring like so many traitors was still ignorant of the fatal brink on which she stood. She chatted and coquettied and smiled, little dreaming that in a very few days her happiness would be wrecked and she would be linked for life to a man whom she could never love. Rocher's idea, of course, was primarily to get hold of her fortune. I had already ascertained for him through the ever-willing Sarah that this fortune came from Leah's grandfather, who had left a sum of two hundred thousand francs on trust for her children. She, to enjoy the income for her life. There certainly was a clause in the will whereby the girl would forfeit that fortune if she married without her father's consent. But according to Rocher's plan this could scarcely be withheld once she had been taken forcibly away from home, with her insurance and with the reputation hopelessly compromised. She could then pose as an injured victim, throw herself at her father's feet and beg him to give that consent without which she would forever remain an outcast of society, a pariah amongst her kind. A pretty piece of villainous combination you will own. And I, sir, was to lend a hand in this abomination. I was to be the chief villain in the drama. It was I who even now was spending the hours of the night when I might have been dreaming sentimental dreams in oiling the lock of the post and gate which was to give us access into Papa Goldberg's garden. It was I who under cover of darkness and guided by that old jade Sarah was to sneak into that garden on the appointed night and forcibly cease the unsuspecting maiden and carry her to the carriage which Rocher would have in readiness for her.  It was a criminal offence in those days, punishable with deportation to a new Caledonia to abduct a young lady from her parents' house and Rocher left me the dirty work to do in case the girl screamed and attracted the police. Now you will tell me if I was not justified in doing what I did and I will abide by your judgment. I was to take all the risks, remember. New Caledonia, the police, the ogum attached to so foul a deed. And do you know for what? For a paltry thousand France which with much difficulty I had induced Rocher nay forced him to hand over to me in anticipation of what I was about to accomplish for his sake. Did this miserliness not characterise the man? Was it to such a scrubby knave that I at risk of my life and my honour would hand over that jewel amongst women that pearl above price, a lady with a personal fortune amounting to two hundred thousand France? No, sir. I would not. Then and there I vowed that I would not. Mine were to be all the risks. Then mine should be the reward. What Rocher meant to do that I could too and with far greater reason. The lovely Lea did at times frown on Fernand but she invariably smiled on me. She would fall into my arms far more readily than into his and Papa Goldberg would be equally forced to give his consent to her marriage with me as with that self-seeking carpet knight whom he abhorred. Needless to say I kept my own counsel and did not speak of my project even to Sarah. To all appearances I was to be the mere tool in this affair.  All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Reading by Lars Rolander Castles in the Air by Baroness Emusca Orksi Chapter 7 An Oversensitive Heart Part 2 The appointed day and hour were at hand Fernand Rocher had engaged a baroush which was to take him and his lovely victim to a little house at Otey which he had rented for the purpose. There the lovers were to lie per die until such time as Papa Goldberg had relented and the marriage could be duly solemnized in the synagogue of the Rue de Salle. Sarah had offered in the meanwhile to do all that in her power lay to soften the old man's heart and to bring about the happy conclusion of the romantic adventure. For the latter we had chosen the night of May 23rd. It was a moonless night and the passage conne from where I was to operate was most usefully dark. Sarah Goldberg had according to convention left the post and gate on the latch and at ten o'clock precisely I made my way up the cul-de-sac and cautiously turned the handle of the door. I confessed that my heart beat somewhat uncomfortably in my bosom. I had left Rocher and his baroush in the Rue de Pippo about a hundred meters from the angle of the passage conne. And it was along those hundred meters of a not altogether unfrequented street that he expected me presently to carry a possibly screaming and struggling burden in the very teeth of a Shang-Dalmerie always on the lookout for exciting captures. No, sir, that was not to be and it was with the resolute if beating heart that I presently felt the post and gate yielding to the pressure of my hand. The neighbouring church-clock of Saint Sulpis had just finished striking ten. I pushed open the gate and tiptoed across the threshold. In the garden the bose of a dilapidated old ash-tree were sowing in the wind above my head, whilst from the top of the boundary wall the jarring and jowling of beasts of the feline species grated unpleasantly on my ear. I could not see my hand before my eyes and I just stretched it out in order to guide my footsteps when it was ceased with the kindly yet firm pressure whilst the voice murmured softly Hush! Who is it? I whispered in response. It is I! Sarah! the voice replied. Everything is all right, but Leah is unsuspecting. I am sure that if she suspected anything she would not set foot outside the door. What shall we do? I asked. Wait here a moment quietly. Sarah joined, speaking in a rapid whisper. Under cover of this wall within the next few minutes Leah will come out of the house. I have left my neating upon a garden chair and I will ask her to run out and fetch it. That will be your opportunity. The chair is in the angle of the wall there. She added, pointing to her right. Not three paces from where you are standing now. Leah has a white dress on. She will have to stoop in order to pick up the knitting. I have taken the precaution to entangle the wool in the leg of the chair so she will be some few seconds entirely at your mercy. Have you a shawl? I had, of course, provided myself with one. A shawl is always a necessary adjunct to such adventures. Breathlessly, silently, I intimidated to my kind accomplice that I would obey her behests and that I was prepared for every eventuality. The next moment her hold upon my hand relaxed. She gave another quickly whispered hash and disappeared into the night. For a second or two after that my ear caught the soft sound of her retreating footsteps, then nothing more. To say that I felt anxious and ill at ease was but to put it mildly. I was face to face with an adventure which might cost me at least five years acutely discomfort in New Caledonia but which might also bring me as richer reward as could befall any man of modest ambitions. A lovely wife and a comfortable fortune. My whole life seemed to be hanging on a thread and my overwrought senses seemed almost to catch the sound of the spinning wheel of fate weaving the web of my destiny. A moment or two later I again caught the distinct sound of a gentle footfall upon the soft earth. My eyes by now were somewhat accustomed to the gloom. It was very dark, you understand but through the darkness I saw something white moving slowly toward me. Then my heart thumped more furiously than ever before. I dared not breathe. I saw the lovely Leah approaching or rather I felt her approach for it was too dark to see. She moved in the direction which Sarah had indicated to me as being the place where stood the garden chair with a knitting upon it. I grasped the shawl. I was ready. Another few seconds of agonising suspense went by. The fair Leah had ceased to move. Undoubtedly she was engaged in disentangling the wool from the leg of the chair. That was my opportunity. More stealthy than any cat I tiptoed toward the chair. And indeed at that moment I blessed the sudden yowl set up by some feline in its wrath which rend the still night air and effectually drowned any sound which I might make. There not three paces away from me was the dim outline of the young girl's form vaguely discernible in the gloom. A white mass almost motionless against a background of inky blackness. With a quick intaking of my breath I sprang forward.  She was as light as a feather and I was as strong as a giant. Think of it, sir. There was I alone in the darkness holding in my arms together with a lovely form of 200,000 francs. Of that fool Fernand Rocher I did not trouble to think. He had a barouche waiting up the Rue du Pippo a hundred meters from the corner of the Passage-Connet but I had a chair and a pair of horses waiting down that same street and that now was my objective. Yes, sir. I had arranged the whole thing but I had done it for my own advantage not for that of the miserly friend who had been too great a coward to risk his own skin for the sake of his beloved. The gairdon was mine and I was determined this time that no traitor or ingrate should filch me from the reward of my labours. With the 1000 francs which Rocher had given me for my services I had engaged the chairs and horses paid the coachmen lavishly and secured a cozy little apartment for my future wife in a pleasant hostelry I knew of at Suresne. I had taken the precaution to leave the wicked gate on the latch. With my foot I pushed it open and keeping well under the cover of the tall convent wall I ran swiftly to the corner of the Rue du Pippo. Here I paused a moment through the silence of the night my ear caught the faint sound of horses snorting and harness dingling in the distance both sides from where I stood but of shangdarnes or passers-by there was no sign gathering up the full measure of my courage and holding my precious burden closer to my heart I ran quickly down the street within the next few seconds I had the seemingly inanimate maiden safely deposited in the inside of the Barouche and myself sitting by her side The driver cracked his whip and whilst I happy but exhausted was mopping my streaming forehead the chairs rattled gaily along the uneven payments of the great city in the direction of Suresne. What that fool Rocherie was doing I could not definitely ascertain. I looked through the vasistas of the coach but could see nothing in pursuit of us Then I turned my full attention to my lovely companion It was pitch dark inside the carriage, you understand only from time to time as we drove past an overhanging street lanthan I caught a glimpse of that priceless bundle beside me which lay there so still and so snug still wrapped up in the shore With cautious loving fingers I undid its folds Under cover of the darkness the sweet and modest creature released of her bonds turned for an instant to me and for a few, very few happy seconds I held her in my arms Have no fear, fair one I murmured in her ear It is I, Hectoratichon who adores you and who cannot live without you Forgive me for this seeming violence which was prompted by an undying passion and remember that to me you are as sacred as a divinity until the happy hour when I can proclaim you to the world as my beloved wife I pressed her against my heart and my lips imprinted a delicate kiss upon her forehead after which with chastity quorum she once more turned away from me covered her face and head with a shawl and drew back into the remote corner of the carriage where she remained silent and absorbed no doubt in the contemplation of her happiness I respected her silence and I too fell to meditating upon my good fortune Here was I, sir, within sight of a haven wherein I could live through the twilight of my days in comfort and in peace a beautiful wujang wife a modest fortune I had never in my wildest dreams envisaged a fate more fair the little house at Changti Yi which I coveted the plot of garden the espalier pitches all, all would be mine now it seemed indeed too good to be true The very next moment I was rudely awakened from those golden dreams by a loud clatter and stern voices shouting the onious word Halt!  I whispered hurriedly Your own hector will protect you Already the door of the carriage had been violently torn open The next moment a gruff voice called out preemptorily By order of the chief commissary of police I was dumbfounded in what manner had the chief commissary of police been already apprised of this affair The whole thing was of course a swift and vengeful blow dealt to me by that cowardly Rocher But how, in the name of thunder had he got to work so quickly But of course there was no time now for reflection The gruff voice was going on more preemptorily and more insistently Is it a ratish on hair? I was dumb My throat had closed up and I could not have uttered a sound to save my life The police had even got my name quite straight Now then ratish on That same irascible voice continued Get out of there In the name of the law I charge you with the abduction of a defenceless female and my orders are to bring you forthwith before the chief commissary of police Then it was that police once more re-entered my soul I had just felt a small hand pressing something crisp into mine whilst the soft voice whispered in my ear Give him this and tell him to let you go in peace Say that I am Mademoiselle Goldberg, your promised wife The feel of that crackling note in my hand at once restored my courage Covering the lovely creature beside me with a protecting arm I replied boldly to the minion of the law This lady, I said, is my affianced wife You, sir Shangdam, are overstepping your powers I demand that you let us proceed in peace My orders are, the Shangdam resumed But already my sensitive ear had detected a faint wavering in the roughness of his voice The hectoring tone had gone out of it I could not see him, of course but somehow I felt that his attitude had become less arrogant and his glance more shifty This gentleman has spoken the truth Now came in soft, dulcet tones from under the shore that wrapped the head of my beloved I am Mademoiselle Goldberg, Monsieur le Shangdam and I am travelling with Monsieur Hectoratichon entirely of my own free will since I have promised him that I would be his wife Ah, the Shangdam air-jaculated obviously mollified If Mademoiselle is the fiancé au monsieur and is acting of her own free will It is not for you to interfere, eh, my friend I broke in jocosly You will now let us proceed in peace and for your trouble you will no doubt accept this token of my consideration And groping in the darkness I found the rough hand of the Shangdam and speedily pressed into it the crisp note which my adored one had given to me Ah, he said with very obvious gratification If Monsieur Ratichon will assure me that Mademoiselle here is indeed his fiancé wife then indeed it is not a case of abduction and abduction I retorted, flaring up in righteous indignation Who dares to use the word in connection with this lovely lady? Mademoiselle Goldberg, I swear will be Madame Ratichon within the next four and twenty hours And the sooner you, Sir Shangdam, allow us to proceed on our way The less pain will you cause to this distressed and virtuous damsel This settled the whole affair quite comfortably The Shangdam shut the carriage door with a bang and at my request gave the order to the driver to proceed The latter once again cracked his whip and once again the cumbersome vehicle after an awkward lurch rattled on its way along the cobblestones of the sleeping city Once more I was alone with a priceless treasure by my side Alone and happy More happy I might say than I had been before Had not my adored one openly acknowledged her love for me and her desire to stand with me at the human altar To put it vulgarly, though vulgarity in every form is repellent to me she had burned her boats She had allowed her name to be coupled with mine in the presence of the minions of the law What after that could her father do but give his consent to a junior which alone would save his only child's refutation from the cruelty of waggish tongues? No doubt, Sir, that I was happy True that when the uncouth trung down finally slammed to the door of our carriage and we restarted on our way my ears had been unpleasantly tickled by the sound of prolonged and rebald laughter laughter which sounded strangely and unpleasantly familiar But after a few seconds serious reflection I dismissed the matter from my thoughts If as indeed I gravely suspected it was Fernand Rocher who had striven thus to put a spoke in the wheel of my good fortune He would certainly not have laughed when I drove triumphantly away with my conquered bride by my side And, of course, my ears must have deceived me when they caught the sound of a girl's merry laugh mingling with a more rebald one of the man I have paused purposely, Sir, here I embark upon the narration of the final stage of this my life's adventure The chairs was bowling along the banks of the river towards Rosni Presently the driver struck to his right and plunged into the fastness of the Bois de Boulogne For a while, therefore, we were in utter darkness My lovely companion neither moved nor spoke Somewhere in the far distance a church clock struck eleven One whole hour had gone by since first I had embarked on this great undertaking I was excited, feverish The beautiful lia silence and tranquility grated upon my nerves I could not understand how she could remain there so placid when her whole life's happiness had so suddenly so unexpectedly been assured I became more and more fidgety as time went on Soon I felt that I could no longer hold myself in proper control Being of an impulsive disposition this tranquil acceptance of so great a joy became presently intolerable and unable to restrain my ardour any longer I seized that passive bundle of loveliness in my arms Have no fear, I murmured once again as I pressed her to my heart But my admonition was obviously unnecessary The beautiful lia showed not the slightest sign of fear She rested her head against my shoulder and put one arm around my neck I was in raptures Just then the vehicle swung out of the Bois and once more rattled upon the cobblestones This time we were nearing Sresne A vague light emanating from the lanterns of the bridgehead was already faintly visible ahead of us Soon it grew brighter The next moment we passed immediately beneath the lanterns The interior of the carriage was flooded with light And sir, I gave a gasp of unodulterated dismay The being whom I held in my arms whose face was even at that moment raised up to my own was not the lovely lia It was Sarah, sir Sarah Goldberg The tower-angular arm whose yellow teeth gleamed for one brief moment through her thin lips as she threw me one of those glances of amorous welcome which invariably sent a cold shiver down my spine Sarah Goldberg High scares could believe my eyes and for a moment did indeed think that the elusive swiftly vanished light of the bridgehead lanterns had played my excited senses a weird and cruel trick But no the very next second proved my disillusionment Sarah spoke to me She spoke to me and laughed Ah, she was happy, sir happy in that she had completely and irrevocably tricked me That traitor Fernand Rocher was up to the neck in the plot which had saddled me forever with an ugly elderly wife of Darmien and no fortune while he and the lovely lia were spinning the threads of perfect love at the other end of Paris and laughing their fill at my discomforture Think, sir, what I suffered during those few brief minutes while the coach lurched through the narrow streets of Sarasne and I had perforced to listen to the protestations of undying love from this unprepossessing female That love she vowed was her excuse and everything she asserted was fair in love and war She knew that after Rocher had attained his heart's desire and carried off the lady of his choice which he had successfully done half an hour before I myself walked my way up the Passage-connet I would pass out of her life forever This she could not endure Life at once would become intolerable and aided and abetted by Rocher and lia she had planned and contrived my mystification and won me by foul means since she could not do so by fair and it seemed as if her volubility then was the forecast for what my life with her would be in the future Talk, talk, talk, she never ceased She told me the whole story of the abominable conspiracies against my liberty Her brother, Monsieur Goldberg, she explained had determined upon remarriage She, Sarah, felt that henceforth she would be in the way of everybody She would have no home Liya married to Rocher a new and young Madame Goldberg ruling in the old house of the Rue de Médicin Ah, it was unthinkable And I, sir, I, Hectoratichon had, it appears, by my polite manners and prepossessing ways induced this tower-old maid to believe that she was not altogether indifferent to me Ah, how I cursed my own charms when I realized whether they had led me It seemed that it was the fickle Jade Liya who first imagined the whole excreable plot Rocher was to entrust me with the task of carrying off his beloved and thus I would be tricked in the darkness into abducting mademoiselle Goldberg's senior from her home Then some friends of Rocher arranged to play the comedy of false shangdams and again I was tricked into acknowledging Sarah as my affianced wife before independent witnesses After that I could no longer repudiate my honorable intentions for if I did then I should be arraigned before the law on her criminal charge of abduction In this comedy of false shangdams Rocher himself and the heartless Liya had joined with zest and laughed over my discomforture whilst the friends who played their roles to such perfection had appalled 300 France each as the price of this infamous trick Now my doom was sealed and all that was left for me to do was to think disconsolently over my future I did bitterly reproach Sarah for a treachery and tried to steal her protestations of love by pointing out to her that I had absolutely no fortune and could only offer her a life of squalor not to say a what but this she knew and vowed that penury by my side would make her happier than luxury beside any other man Ah, sir, it is given to few men to rouse such selfless passion in a woman's heart and it hath oft been my dream in the past one day thus to be adored for myself alone but for the moment I was too deeply angered to listen placidly to Sarah's vows of undying affection My nerves were irritated by her fulsome adulation Indeed I could not bear to the sight of her nor yet the sound of her voice You may imagine how thankful I was when the chairs came at last to halt outside the humble little hostelry where I had engaged the room which I had so fondly hoped would have been occupied by the lovely and fickle Leah I bundled Mademoiselle Goldberg senior into the house and here again I had to endure galling mortification in the shape of side-long glances cast at me and my future bride by the landlord of the hostelry and his ill-bred daughter When I engaged the room I had very foolishly told her that it would be occupied by a lovely lady who had consented to be my wife and that she would remain here in happy seclusion until such time as all arrangements for our wedding were complete The humiliation of these vulgar people's irony seemed like the last straw which overweighed my forbearance The room and pension I had already paid two days in advance so I had nothing more to say either to the revolt landlord or to Mademoiselle Goldberg senior I was bitterly angered against her and refused her the solace of a kindly loop for of an encouraging pressure from my hand even though she waited for both with the pathetic patience of an old spaniel I re-entered the coach which was to take me back to my own humble lodgings in Passy Here at least I was alone Alone with my gloomy thoughts my heart was full of wrath against the woman who had so basely tricked me and I viewed with dismay amounting almost to despair the prospect of spending the rest of my life in her company That night I slept but little nor yet the following night or the night after that those days I spent in seclusion thankful for my solitude Twice each day did Mademoiselle Goldberg come to my lodgings In the foolish past I had somewhat in judiciously acquainted her of where I lived Now she came and asked to be allowed to see me but invariably did I refuse thus to gratify her I felt that time alone would perhaps soften my feelings a little towards her In the meanwhile I must commend her discretion and delicacy of procedure She did not in any way attempt to molest me when she was told by Theodore whom I employed during the day to guard me against unwelcome visitors that I refused to see her she invariably went away without humour nor did she refer in any way either with adurations or threats to the impending wedding Indeed, sir, she was a lady of vast discreet tone On the third day however I received a visit from Monsieur Goldberg himself I could not refuse to see him Indeed, he would not be denied but roughly pushed Theodore aside who tried to hinder him He had come armed with a riding whip and nothing but my own innate dignity saved me from outrage He came, sir, with a marriage license for his sister and me in one pocket and with a denunciation to the police against me for abduction in another He gave me the choice What could I do, sir? I was like a helpless babe in the hands of unscrupulous brigands The marriage license was for the following day at the marie of the eight around the Simone first and in the synagogue of the Rue de Salle afterwards I chose the marriage license What could I do, sir? I was helpless Of my wedding day I have bought a dim recollection It was all hustle and bustle from the marie to the synagogue and thence to the house of Monsieur Goldberg in the Rue de Medecin I must say that the old Monsieur received me and my bride with marked amiability He was, I gathered, genuinely pleased that his sister had found happiness and a home by the side of an honourable man seeing that he himself was on the point of contracting a fresh alliance with a Jewish lady of unsurpassed loveliness Of Roshri and Leah we saw nothing that day and from one or two words which Monsieur Goldberg let fall I concluded that he was greatly angered against his daughter because of her marriage with a fortune-hunting adventurer who he weirdly hinted had already found quick and exemplary punishment for his crime I was sincerely glad to hear this even though I could not get Monsieur Goldberg to explain in what that exemplary punishment consisted The climax came at six o'clock of that eventful afternoon at the hour when I, with the newly enthroned Madame Ratishon on my arm, was about to take leave of Monsieur Goldberg I must admit that at that moment my heart was overflowing with bitterness I had been led like a lamb to the slaughter I had been made to look foolish and absurd in the midst of this Israeli community which I despised I was saddled for the rest of my life with an unprepossessing elderly wife who could do not for me but share my penury the hard crusts, the onion pies, with me and Theodore The only advantage I might ever derive from her was that she would darn my stockings sew the buttons on my vests and gov'r the frills of my shirts Was this not enough to turn any man's naturally sweetest position to go? No doubt my mobile face betrayed something of the bitterness of my thoughts for Monsieur Goldberg at one moment slapped me vigorously on the back and bade me be a good chair as things were not so bad as I imagined I was on the point of asking him what he meant when I saw another gentleman advancing toward me his face which was salo and oily for a kind of obsequious smile his clothes were of rusty black and his features were markedly Jewish in character he had some law papers under his arm and was perpetually rubbing his thin bony hands together if he were forever washing them Monsieur Hectoratishong he said anxiously it is with much gratification that I bring you the joyful news joyful news to me ha ha sir the words struck at first with cruel irony upon my ne'er but not so a second later for the Jewish gentleman went on speaking and what he said appeared to my reeling senses like songs of angels from paradise at first I could not grasp his full meaning a moment ago I had been in the depth of despair and now now a whole vista of the attitude opened out before me what the worthy Israeli said was that by the terms of Grand Papa Goldberg's will if Leah married without her father's consent one half of the fortune destined for her would revert to her aunt Sarah Goldberg now Madame Hectoratishong can you wonder that I could scarce believe my ears one half that fortune meant that a hundred thousand France would now become mine Monsieur Goldberg had already made it very clear to his daughter and to Roshi that he would never give his consent to their marriage and as this was now consummated they had already forfeited one half of the grandfather's fortune in favor of my Sarah that was the exemplary punishment which they were to suffer for their folly but their folly I and their treachery had become my joy in this moment of heavenly rapture I was speechless but I turned to Sarah with loving arms outstretched and the next instant she nestled against my heart like a joyful if elderly bird what is said of a people sir is also true of the individual happy he who hath no history since that never to be forgotten our my life has run its simple uneventful course here in this quiet corner of our beautiful France with my pony and my dog and my chickens and Madame Bratishong to minister to my creature comforts I bought this little property sir soon after my marriage and my office in the Rue de Nantes knows me no more you like the house sir ah yes and the garden after the journey you must see my price chickens Theodore will show them to you you did not know Theodore was here well yes he lives with us Madame Bratishong finds him useful about the house and not being used to luxuries he's on the whole pleasantly contented ah here comes Madame Bratishong to tell us that the dictionary is served this way sir under the porch after you the end end of chapter 7 part 2 and end of the book castles in the air by Baroness Emushka Orksi read by Lars Rolander thank you for listening


There is now a consensus that the status of women has improved considerably in the last few decades when we consider outcomes related to jobs, health, education, as well as a family planning choices and fertility of women. However, substantial improvements are yet to be made when we consider outcomes such as their representation in politics, the wages and occupations that they are in, as well as their legal rights. We've been looking at a number of studies that rely on high quality data from a variety of developing countries and the broad objective is to understand how women can be empowered both within their households as well as in the public domain. There are studies that look at the effect of gender, there are studies that look at the effect of ethnicity and then there are studies that look at the effect of economic status in determining one's outcomes. However, we find that it is the overlap of these multiple identities that is important for determining outcomes such as jobs, health and education.


I am Master Sergeant Mason Bergeron from the 18th OSS Air Crew Flight Equipment and this is Autumn. He is a Jindo mix that I found in Gunsan, South Korea while I was stationed at Gunsan Air Base in 2019. And I just picked him up a few days ago. I was stationed at Gunsan Air Base in March 2019 and from the hotel I could hear a dog barking out the window and I found this dog and his sister chained up in a field and they were about six months old at the time. It didn't seem like anyone was taking care of them so I started going there every weekend. For three months I would go around to these dogs and feed them and bring them toys and blankets. Eventually I found some Korean volunteers from a local shelter and they were able to help me rescue these dogs and bring them to Gunsan Dogland which was a animal sanctuary that has about 600 dogs living there. So I felt obligated to them to volunteer there every weekend and the more I talked about it the more people wanted to get involved. That ended up turning into a group called Dogland Outreach that had about 200 active duty service members at one point. I decided to adopt this guy and my plan was to PCS with him but when I left in March of 2020 is when the travel restrictions got really tight I wasn't able to take him with me at that time. I'd never stopped thinking about him. My plan was always to go back and get him at some point. I'm hoping for the right time by making all of the right connections with people in Korea and people in Japan. We were able to work the process out and they flew him to Tokyo. I flew to Tokyo and I met him there and then brought him back. You know dogs are man's best friend and I think when we see situations that require somebody to do something it's important for us especially service members not to walk past it. If I never would have stopped for these dogs and looked for them they would not be here right now. So I think it's important just to do the right thing when the opportunity presents itself.


Recently I decided to do a crazy experiment with IELTS test. I went down to Dublin by two hours from where I live and I did the real IELTS test because I wanted to test something that has been bothering me for many, many years. Do me a favor, don't skip ahead and look at the results. All right, don't skip ahead and look and think, oh, you got that result. Well, you know, a native English speaker who teaches IELTS for a living should be getting a band nine. So, you know, it's kind of like Lewis Hamilton doing the driving test and passing the driving test. It is not such a big deal because this is my job. Instead, what I decided to do was this experiment. So the IELTS test is divided into four parts, listening, reading, speaking and writing. What I decided to do was for two parts of the test, go and look at the most popular advice, the most popular tips and tricks for that part of the test and follow that blindly. And for the other two parts, I looked up the common advice, the most popular tips and tricks for those two parts of the test, and decided to do the exact opposite. So don't follow the advice, do the opposite. And then let's see what the scores should be. So let's check out what happened. So starting off with the listening test, the two most common tips that you see on popular blogs and YouTube videos are number one, really focus on keywords. So when you're looking at the questions, focus in on the keywords, the keywords will reveal the correct answer to you. And the second tip is skip ahead. When you finish a section, go straight away and read the questions and try and find those keywords. So it's a very keyword driven way of doing the listening test. And this is the most popular advice out there. It's not the advice that we give at IELTS Advantage, but it's certainly the advice that millions of people use every test day. So for the listening part, I followed the gurus, just did exactly what they said. And I had to abandon that strategy after the first section, because I found it nearly impossible to focus on what I was doing. A huge part of listening is focusing and being able to focus on the question and focus on the listening at the same time.  You need to read, listen and think and decide the correct answer all at the same time. And I think that I got the first question wrong, because I was really focusing on keywords and then skipping ahead and trying to think about what is happening next instead of really just doing what I should be doing, which is looking at the question and waiting for the listening and thinking about it more holistically. So I think that I got the first question wrong. And it was an extremely simple question. It was a registration number, a number plate on a car. And I think I got that wrong, because what I was doing was really focusing on keywords and thinking about what was coming next. And what that did was it stopped me actually getting this really simple answer. Like the first question in the listening test is the easiest one. I think I got that wrong. And I paid a lot of money for this test and this, you know, this experiment. And I thought I was thinking to myself after section one, I better abandon this strategy of focusing on the keywords and then skipping ahead, because I my mind was going blank. I couldn't think straight and I couldn't focus on what I was doing. So here's the result. I ended up getting a band nine for the listening test. But if I had of maintained that strategy, I definitely would have got much lower than a nine. And really, to be honest, I didn't want to embarrass myself. So I followed the common popular guru thinking. And I think I got the first question wrong, and I abandoned that. And I would not recommend that to anybody, because you really just lose focus. And my mind was going blank. And I couldn't really understand what was going on. And that's as a native English speaker. So I did get a band nine, but it was only because I abandoned the strategy after the first section. So a pretty good start, a band nine so far. But it was quite shocking how difficult I find the first section and the first section is the easiest section. Moving on to reading, the three most common things that you will see online about reading, the popular tips and tricks are skimming, scanning and keywords. So all you have to do is skim the text, scan the text, look at keywords and the questions, and then magically you're going to find the correct answer. This is all kind of designed to trick your way into getting the correct answer somehow and to focus on doing it as quickly as possible. It's really about time management, that advice. And I totally disagree with that advice because it is not a time management test. It is a reading test. So what I did instead was basically the opposite of that. I didn't do any skimming. I didn't do any scanning. I did no keyword highlighting or anything like that. What I did was carefully read the text, really, really carefully read it. Then I went to the questions and I basically applied the strategies that I teach for each of the different types of questions, thought about them very deeply, read very carefully, no skimming, no scanning, really thinking about the correct answer to each question. And I believe I got 100%, all of them correct. I got a band nine, as you can see up here, by following exactly the opposite of what the gurus teach. And not only that, I got it all done in about 20 minutes. Now that is not bragging. Anyone who is a native English speaker should be able to get a band nine in reading by doing that. But if I was skimming, scanning keywords, I think I would have messed it up because a lot of the questions skimming is a waste of time. A lot of the questions, keywords is looking for keywords is a waste of time. So by focusing on time management, I actually would have wasted a lot of time ironically, because good time management is not really about time management tips. It is about becoming better at reading and reading carefully and deciding the correct answer based on your understanding of the text and your understanding of the questions. And all of that skimming, scanning keywords, that kind of gets in the way of it. Now some of the strategies that I use do deploy some of those things, but in a very limited way, not answering every question in that way. So doing the complete opposite of the gurus band nine. The next one was speaking. So I did the opposite of what I was supposed to do in speaking the opposite of what the top tips and tricks. So again, what I did, what are the most common, most popular tips and tricks for speaking? They are for part one, memorize answers, you're going to get questions about your job, you're going to get questions about where you live in your home. So memorize some answers. I didn't do that. Use idioms and phrasal verbs and things like that. I didn't use one single idiom the entire time. I was told to use idioms, didn't use them at all. Use a very high level vocabulary. Didn't use high level vocabulary. What I did was just answer the questions in a simple language as possible and only use high level vocabulary when I absolutely had to. When there was no simple way of saying it. But where are you from? I'm from the place that I'm from. I didn't say I reside or I dwell in like, I wasn't using really high level words when I could use simple words. Complex grammar didn't really focus on using the most complex grammar, the most complex sentences or the most complex tenses I could think of. If they asked me about the past, I used the past tense. If they asked me what I was thought about the future, I would say like, I think they might be doing this in the future or I said Elon Musk has big plans for this. I wasn't using really complex standardized grammar that you'll see online. Part five or part number five, I was told in part two, using these popular strategies, you must focus on the bullet points in part two. You must address each of the bullet points. If you don't talk about the bullet points, you will not get a high score. I didn't even look at the bullet points. I just talked about the stuff at the top, the topic at the top. And I just talked naturally about that. And I don't know if I use the bullet points or not, but I didn't really consider them. And then the sixth popular piece of advice is part three is very formal. It's very academic. So you should use lots of academic words and talk about it in that kind of formal academic way. I talked about it in a really informal, non-academic, very friendly conversational way. So I did exactly the opposite of the advice and I got a band nine. So there's a lot of people out there that will tell you if you don't use idioms, you'll get a low score. That is completely false, based on my experience doing the real test. And at IELTS Advantage, we've got like 12 X examiners who would agree with me on that. So who is right? Is your YouTube guru right? Or is the actual examiner right? A lot of people will say if you miss a bullet point, you will get a low score. A lot of people say if you don't use high level vocabulary and complex grammar, you will get a low score. This is completely untrue. And this was not because I'm a native English speaker. And somehow my pronunciation was so magnificent or that I, you know, got a really high score. It's not done on pronunciation alone. It's not done on fluency alone. It's not done on grammar alone. It's not done on vocabulary alone. In order to get a band nine, you need to be a band nine for everything. And if you are lacking in two of those things, then you're going to get at least an 8.5. That didn't happen. Writing was the most interesting part. So I have seen other YouTubers, IELTS YouTubers going and doing the real test and getting 6.5, getting 7, 7.5 in the writing, and then blaming the examiner and blaming the writing or blaming the test and all sorts of things. I don't think that's right. I think that's probably because their methods are not very effective. And if you are a native English speaker and you're getting 6.5, 7 in the IELTS test, then you're doing something seriously wrong. And that's what I did. What I did was I did a few things that are popular advice. And I believe that they're seriously wrong. So what did I do? I used high level ideas. So very common advice, very popular advice about the writing test is make sure your ideas are very high level. Whatever that means, they're impressive. They would really impress the examiner. Number two, make sure that your vocabulary is very, very high level. As complex and as high level and as many C2 and C1 words as possible, never repeat a word. Always vary your language as much as possible. That's very common advice. Number three, make sure that your ideas are impressive, that they impress the examiner in some way, that the examiner will look at it and think, these are really impressive ideas. And number four, make sure that your grammar is very complex, that you use many different structures, that you use like things like conditionals and multiple different conditionals and you use multiple different types of tense and complex structures and everything. This made writing the essay really difficult because a few problems came up. Number one, it took me a long time to try and think of high level ideas. And I wasted a lot of time before I knew it, like eight minutes had gone by. And I was still thinking, what is a really high level idea? Then when I started writing, what I noticed was there were certain keywords that I didn't know how to vary. So one of the keywords was hobby. There's only a few ways that you but it was a some people like high tech hobbies, some people like low tech hobbies. So the whole thing was about hobbies. So what all I was doing while I was writing, instead of thinking, how do I write a clear essay, what I was doing was thinking, how do I change hobbies, which really isn't that important. The examiner is testing your writing, the exact and clear communication and writing, they're not testing how many different variations of the word hobby can you put down. So that made my job really, really difficult. For part one, I was trying to think of something that would impress the examiner. So I was trying to think of something that would be really interesting. It was write a letter to your boss about the dress code. So to impress the examiner, I wrote that I was working in a restaurant called Hooters. Don't know if you know this, but Hooters is like a restaurant where all the ladies wear very skimpy outfits. So I pretended to be a Hooters girl and complain about my outfit and the men were harassing me and everything. I thought that was funny and pressed the examiner that way. And I tried to use really complex grammar. So what I was doing was actually deleting good, simple sentences with really effective, simple grammar in it and trying to make it more complex. So everything that I did by following the common advice, the popular advice, that made my job much more difficult. And I got a band eight. So I should have got a band nine. But because my job was made so much more difficult, I was a full band below where I really should be. And that's something that you should really think about. You probably deserve a much higher band than you are currently getting. But if you are doing even one of those things, you're not bad at writing. You're just making your life more difficult by following popular advice on YouTube and on blogs. That doesn't really help you get a high score. Because what you should be doing is instead of thinking of high level ideas, try and think of simple ideas. Simple ideas are easy to write about, easy to think about, easy to explain, easy to think of examples for high level vocabulary actually lowers your vocabulary score because you're trying to think of ways of varying your vocabulary and making it more complex and making your your job more difficult and probably you're writing less clear, impressive ideas. It's just an extra thing that you need to think about. You're running out of time, you don't have time to check your work because you were spending all that time trying to think of impressive ideas. And you're probably making grammar mistakes because you're making your grammar more complex. So have a think about that. By following the advice and listening, I nearly messed up my listening test. By doing the opposite, I got a band nine and reading in 20 minutes. By doing the opposite in speaking, I got a band nine. By doing what the gurus tell you to do. Most of the gurus, not all of them, there's some good coaches and trainers online, not criticizing all of them. I know you guys think that I am overly critical. The reason why I'm overly critical is I spent 200 euro plus 100 euro getting my writing rechecked. So that's 300 euros in test fees. I spent 160 euros on a hotel. I spent 50 euros on food breakfast and dinner because I had to go down and stay there. I spent another 20 euros on petrol. I took half a day off work. That cost me probably about 500 euros. So close to a thousand euros in just doing this test. And I know that you guys spend an equivalent amount of money and it makes it even worse for you guys because if you don't get the scores that you need, that means that you can't go and work in that country of your dreams and achieve and earn the money that you deserve. It's easy for me. All I had to do was drive up the road and I'm back into my big house working in my nice job, getting paid what I deserve. Most people doing the test, when they follow this advice, don't have that choice. What they are told is you failed the test. Your scores are lower than you hoped for. We're not going to tell you why and what people normally do, what their normal reaction to that is. I'm dumb.  I need to go and do more tips and tricks, make things more complex, more impressive ideas, learn more idioms and then they go and fail again. Okay, I need to find another guru and learn even more tips and tricks and hacks and shortcuts and then they fail again. This is why I get so passionate about this because we get emails every single day from students saying, I failed because they followed this advice, this common advice. If this common advice can make a native English speaker fail the test by getting a band eight in writing and doing the exact opposite leads to a band nine, that might make you think. And if you think, oh, my expertise as an IELTS teacher and as a native English speaker and as an educated person from Ireland, that means that of course you would have got a band nine. Go and look at other IELTS experts from native English speakers who've done the test for real. They're not getting band nine and everything. So it makes you think, doesn't it? So hopefully you find this interesting. If you did and you have questions about how do I actually get the scores that I need? Well, you just follow exactly what examiners should show you or would advise you to do, which is do the opposite to most of the stuff you see online. Why is it popular? Because that's what you guys want. You want tips and tricks. What you need is something completely different. If you want something completely different, feel free to get in touch with us and we will help you out as much as we can. Thank you very much. Hope that you find that interesting. Special thanks to the people at the IELTS test center. They were amazing. They made me feel really comfortable, really professional. They did their best to reduce nerves amongst the other candidates and things like that. It was really, really professional. I'll probably make a follow-up video on what it was like to do the computer-based test. If you want that or any other videos in the future, feel free to subscribe or unsubscribe if you don't like the channel and feel free to give the video a like or a dislike if you didn't think that this video was helpful. Thanks very much and hope to hear from you soon. Bye-bye.