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Ball says: "One patient perceives at the beginning of the attack a toothed wheel, in the middle of which there appears a human face making strange contortions; another sees a series of smiling landscapes. In some cases it is the sense of hearing which is affected; the patient hears voices or strange noises. Others are warned by the sense of smell that the fit is going to commence."

In striving to get out of the rut of commonplace which had so long held in its grip the wheels of English art, not originality, so much as deliberate, sought-out eccentricity, was the result. The scale of work, starting from the original bathos of domestic sentimentality, runs up to the veriest contortions of affected mediævalism, rarely striking out a note of common sense.

Presently thin suggestions of light, variously tinted, began to thread the inky mass. These grew brighter and more vivid, until at last, in fantastic contortions, they appeared to rend the swart concave asunder, revealing through the jagged clefts a lurid waste of the most intensely glowing fire.

In all, each movement had the comely precision of finely adjusted clockwork, though at times John Bulmer's face showed a spurt of amusement roused by the brigand's extravagancy of gesture and Cazaio's contortions as he strove to pass the line of steel that flickered cannily between his sword and John Bulmer's portly bosom. Then John Bulmer, too, attacked.

He showed in a second the contortions of Harry Weston in drawing the bow, and in another the grimaces of Henry Hope, the choir man, in producing bass notes, or the swelling majesty of Randall Porcher, the cross-bearer, till it really seemed as if he had shown off the humours of at least a third of the enormous household.

Along its crest there was a brief struggle, hand to hand, and then the braves of Le Loutre were seen fleeing through the smoke. The Missaguash is a stream with as many windings as the storied Meander, and about half a mile beyond the lines which the English had just carried the contortions of the channel brought another and almost parallel ridge of dike.

Other plants, which in this contest for light and air were too slender to rise by their own strength, learned by degrees to adhere to their neighbours, either by putting forth roots like the ivy, or by tendrils like the vine, or by spiral contortions like the honeysuckle; or by growing upon them like the misleto, and taking nourishment from their barks; or by only lodging or adhering on them, and deriving nourishment from the air, as tillandsia.

"You poor beastie," the ranger called, pityingly, and the dog leaped up in a frenzy of joyous relief, putting his paws on his breast, then dropped to the ground, and, crouching low on his front paws, quivered and yawned with ecstasy of worship. It seemed that he could not express his passionate adoration, his relief, except by these grotesque contortions. "Come in, Laddie!"

Suppose yourself walking down the street with a man who continues to sprinkle the crowd out of a flask of vitriol. You would be much diverted with the grimaces and contortions of his victims; and at the same time you would fear to leave his arm until his bottle was empty, knowing that, when once among the crowd, you would run a good chance yourself of baptism with his biting liquor.

Then when she did catch sight of them it was only to be grossly insulted; for whenever the small scalawags guessed they were within range of the spyglass they would stand in line, and go through frightful contortions of the face and body, expressive of contempt for the instrument and everything behind it. Wherever the orphans went, depredations of all sorts followed.