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Rose would not fail to do if I gave him so good an opportunity, that my proposal would be a greater bore than the solitude it destroyed. It shall be no such thing, but only the trouble of a journey. I feel too, as I grow older, the vis inertiæ, and fancy that locomotion is more difficult, but let us abjure the doctrine, for it baulks much pleasure.
Then I saw my prison house. It was a little square chamber, very high, with on my left the massive door by which Ivery had departed. The dark baulks of my rack were plain, and I could roughly make out how the thing had been managed. Some spring had tilted up the flooring, and dropped the framework from its place in the right-hand wall.
Now if culture did nothing worse than create a class of well-educated ladies and gentlemen who read books, attend concerts, travel in Italy, and talk a good deal about art without ever guessing what manner of thing it is, culture would be nothing to make a fuss about. Unfortunately, culture is an active disease which causes positive ill and baulks potential good.
'Some have urged the holy kiss, but then I have asked why they made baulks; why they did salute the most handsome, and let the ill-favoured go. The character and narrative of Fearing is drawn and arranged with great judgment, and in a very affecting manner.
It has been remarked that silence obtains its fullest and most impressive quality when it is broken by some minute sound; and, truth to tell, the place was never still. Perhaps the mildness of the spring air operated on its torpid old timbers; perhaps Oleron's fires caused it to stretch its old anatomy; and certainly a whole world of insect life bored and burrowed in its baulks and joists.
There are some sailing ships, you still see them in this part of the world, and these are loading masses of timber baulks from the great pine woods inland. Lumbering and logging are the two great occupations of the Western Canadian winter, and what you see here is the fruit of that work. Terribly hard work it is too.
Poor little Dabby, though, was shot dead while entering the breach the shell of our nine-pounder had made in the outer palisade that protected the Arab defences; and then, finding a second fence composed of similar baulks of timber in front of us, as strong as that we had surmounted, and that the fire of the Somalis increased the nearer we got to them, our chaps, staggered by the fall of poor Dabby, I must confess it, all at once began to cut and run!
The cry of the populace lulled down to a mere murmur, and the trampling of the hoofs echoed strangely as they passed under the vaulted arch and along the walled-in track with its huge baulks of timber on both sides supporting the growth of stone walls.
A tackle hooked to one of the baulks of timber forming the staith was being hauled at by five women and two men! Two others were in a listless fashion leaning their shoulders against the boat itself.
It was a fine apartment in which we found ourselves, large, lofty, and heavily raftered with huge baulks of age-blackened oak. In the great old-fashioned fireplace behind the high iron dogs a log-fire crackled and snapped. Sir Henry and I held out our hands to it, for we were numb from our long drive.
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