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Smith might do something for the improvement of higher instruction. To him, therefore, I wrote, proposing that if he would contribute an equal sum to a university at Syracuse, I would give to it one half of my own property. In his answer he gave reasons why he could not join in the plan, and my scheme seemed no nearer reality than my former air-castles. It seemed, indeed, to have faded away like

And while I worked, I built the most beautiful air-castles, and dreamed dreams, the pleasantest of which was of the time when I should talk like other people, and the thought of the pleasure it would give my mother to hear my voice once more, sweetened every effort and made every failure an incentive to try harder next time.

I knew that, with all my air-castles shattered, with the knowledge that to him literature was a pastime, while to me it meant livelihood, I gloried more in his success than I should in my own, that I was glad that he, and not I, was to have fame; and in the tumult of new emotions against which I struggled, my lip quivered, I turned aside my head, and felt, but I did not see, the hand that touched mine, thrilling me so that I drew away.

He filled her canvas water-bags and went with her to carry them, and he cheered her much with his air-castles.

When the immigrant arrives at his destination, he soon finds that his most reasonable projects prove to be the veriest air-castles, and that his reliance must be on Providence and his own strong arm. This state of things is specially trying to the man of small means and unaccustomed to physical toil, as was the case with Mr. Payson.

"Sure, we're no worse off than we were before. And here we've had a whole week of hope and fine air-castles. I've seen 'em tumble down so often that I've a shell like a turtle's now. Forget it." "But there is one thing I wish to understand thoroughly," put in Worth slowly. "And that?" La Signorina was never sure of this man.

Anna had felt in those days of waiting that she could never again be happy; that for her "finis" had been written by the fates. But, as she lay with the dark-haired baby on her breast, she found herself planning for the little girl's future; even happy in the building of those heavenly air-castles that young mothers never weary of building.

His wife, thanks and perhaps blame to the wifely sense of dependence upon her husband, had fallen back upon him entirely after what he had said about his intention as to the future of the family, and she not only accepted his assurances as bearing upon the material requirements of several mouths from day to day, but she also built some air-castles which he was under the unpleasant necessity of knocking down.

The breath of human passion had stained the pure crystal of her childish imagination; she peopled all her air-castles, and sounds of wailing farewells floated from the White North of her fancy after the procession of the evergreen trees in the west yard, and the cherry-trees on the east had found out that they were not in the Garden of Eden.

He was reconstructing his air-castles on broader lines and smiling now and then to himself. He had no goldpan of his own, since this was not a mining country, and his ambition had run in a different channel. He, therefore, took the tin washbasin down to the creek and dumped the sand into it.