United States or Luxembourg ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The occupation of Guernsey by Owen of Wales was the beginning of a new series of French victories. Up to that time the northern coastlands of Aquitaine, lower Poitou, Saintonge, and Angoumois had remained almost entirely under their English lords. In the hope of resisting attack, the English projected the invasion of France both from Calais and from Guienne.

Venice and the German Emperors were registered among the tributaries of the Porte. From it three quarters of the coastlands of the Mediterranean took their orders. The Nile, the Euphrates, and almost the Danube had become Turkish rivers, as the archipelago and the Black Sea were Turkish inland waters.

Who can tell? There was a certain lord of the coastlands, a hairy giant who, they said, could eat half a sheep at a sitting and break the backs of men in his hands, of whom Urco's mother used to think much. But who can tell? No one except my father, the Sun, and he guards his secrets for the present.

Water, indeed, is one of the glories of the Sila everywhere it bubbles forth in chill rivulets among the stones and trickles down the hill-sides to join the larger streams that wend their way to the forlorn and fever-stricken coastlands of Magna Graecia.

The man did not know their destination, but believed it to be somewhere in the north. The thought vaguely disquieted me. In these perilous times I wished to think of her as safe in the coastlands, where a ship would give a sure refuge. I met Grey that afternoon at the Half-way Tavern. In the last week he seemed to have aged and grown graver. There was now no hint of the light arrogance of old.

Their fate, taking it, would be to be pressed southward along the backbone of Italy by new waves and waves of peoples; and among the wild valleys to lose their culture, and become highlandmen, bandit tribes and raiding clans; until the first comers of them had been driven down right into the hot coastlands of the heel and toe of Italy.

Some scholars have seen an allusion to their overthrow in the tradition of the Phoenicians which brought their ancestors into the coastlands of Canaan in consequence of an earth-quake on the shores of "the Assyrian Lake." But the lake is more probably to be looked for in the neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf than in the valley of the Jordan.

The taste of Cyprus was still in his mouth; the sweet sticky air of the coastlands; the smell of endless camps of packed humanity, set among mountains of barrels and malodorous sprouting forage-stuffs; the narrow streets lit at night by flares of tarry staves; and over all that rotting yet acrid flavour which is the token of the East.

Mine hostess obligingly sang me two or three songs in her native language; the priest furnished me with curious statistics of folklore and criminology; and the notary, with whom I conversed awhile on the tiny piazza that overlooks the coastlands and distant Ionian, was a most affable gentleman.

Old authors praise the beauty of the women of Cotrone, Bagnara, and other southern towns; for my part, I have seldom found good-looking women in the coastlands of Calabria; the matrons, especially, seem to favour that ideal of the Hottentot Venus which you may study in the Jardin des Plantes; they are decidedly centripetal.