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And it heard there the shout of the North Wind, who was dominant and angry, as he drove southwards his adventurous geese; while the rushes bent before him chaunting plaintively and low, like enslaved rowers of some fabulous trireme, bending and swinging under blows of the lash, and singing all the while a doleful song.

By hundreds they came, and surrounding the body of their friend raised the most doleful howls. For, though they rubbed him with their warm noses, and licked him with their warm tongues, and nestled against him with their warm fur, they could not bring him back to warm life. They called upon Brother Bear to speak and tell them what to do; for he was the nearest relative to man.

There was a sighing of the wind about the windows, as if it sought admittance to reason and remonstrate with her. A cricket sang his monotonous song on the hearth. In the wainscot of the room a deathwatch ticked its doleful omen. The dog in the courtyard howled plaintively as the hour of midnight sounded upon the Convent bell, close by.

Then we shrank back from our first glimpse of a little swamp of foul brown water, backed up by the sand-brush, with trees in every stage of decay, fallen and tangled into a doleful thicket, through which the spider-legged Mangroves rose on stilted roots.

So saying the veteran stole back into the cave, noiselessly filled the battered coffee-pot and set it on the coals, said a few reassuring words to Kate and begged her to remember him in her prayers, laughed at her doleful and despairing reply and returned to his post. All quiet. Even the wild-cat had disappeared and there was now no longer light by which he could have detected the creature.

Betty, who had been trying to read a novel, closed the book and turned to them with a laugh. "Goodness, you all sound doleful," she told them. "It seems to me that we ought to be able to live through it, even if we don't get Wild Rose Lodge for the summer. There are plenty of other things we can do," Mollie turned upon her indignantly. "How you talk, Betty Nelson," she scolded her.

The poor wretch wrote me doleful epistles, entreating me to come to his assistance; but the sole effect of his letters was to make me look after what he called his family, repaying myself with the enjoyment of his mistress's young sister. I did not feel called upon to behave generously to him for nothing.

I shook my head, and answered wearily: "Worse than that." My wife regarded me in anxious silence, while manifestly she was cudgelling her brains to divine what could have happened. As she told me afterward, she imagined, from my doleful air, that I must at least have a seed in my little sac. "They have asked me to run for Congress in this district," I finally vouchsafed to state.

Then having ended these doleful plaints, and crowned the tomb with garlands and sundry nosegays, and marvellous lovingly embraced the same: she commanded they should prepare her bath, and when she had bathed and washed her self, she fell to her meat, and was sumptuously served. Now whilst she was at dinner, there came a countryman, and brought her a basket.

On every occasion, however felicitous, she offered her condolences in a feeble voice, that seemed to have been washed a great many times and to have faded. But she was a good manager, a devoted wife, and was more cheerful at home than elsewhere, for she had there plenty of trials to exercise her eloquence, and not enough joy to make it her duty to be doleful.