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The house was Platonian without, plain and dumpy, with gingerbread Gothic on the porch, blistered paint, and the general lines of a prairie barn, but the living-room was more nearly beautiful than any room Carl had seen.

"Because old branches bear small fruit, young branches bear large, and large fruit is worth more than twice as much as small. Give me the saw." I handed him the thin-bladed saw, and he rapidly cut out the old hard bough, close down to the place where it branched from the dumpy trunk, and then, handing me the tool, he knelt down on a pad of carpet he carried in his tremendous pocket.

Wilson sang out of tune; the music is not in his voice, and he was frightened. Miss Cawse was rather a dumpy Artaxerxes, which is an impertinent remark for me to make; she has a beautiful contralto voice. The opera went off brilliantly, and after it the audience called for "God Save the King," which was performed. Paganini was in the box opposite to us; what a cadaverous-looking creature he is!

Sancho, studying the coming stage with Blake's binocular until it dove into the arroyo five hundred yards to the west, handed that costly instrument to the silent, dumpy, dark-skinned woman who stood patiently at his side, and said briefly, "Dos" at which she vanished, and after restoring the glass to its hiding-place in her bedroom, was heard uplifting a shrill, raucous voice at the back of the house, ordering dinner to be ready for two.

A dumpy little man, of forty years or more, dressed in a baggy suit of grey tweed, with carpet slippers on his dumpy little feet. He had evidently started out of the inn to enjoy a smoke in the open air, sublimely unconscious of the scrutiny that was levelled upon him the while. His uncovered head showed a large bald patch, his face was round and of a cherubic serenity.

Arthur was about sixteen years old when he began to reign; in person he had what his friends would call a dumpy, but his mamma styled, a neat little figure. His hair was of a healthy brown colour, which looked like gold in the sunshine. His face was round, rosy, freckled, and good-humoured.

He had, somehow, joined her ladyship's party, and they were looking at the fort, and its tri-colored flag that floats familiar in Vandevelde's pictures and at the lazy shipping, and the tall roofs, and dumpy church towers, and flat pastures, lying before us in a Cuyplike haze. I am sorry to say, I told them the most awful fibs about that fort.

It was a broad back done up in black silk not of the newest. The whole figure, one may say, was dumpy. The black silk was not long, as dresses now are worn, nor wide in its skirts. In every way it was skimpy, considering the breadth it had to cover; and below the silk I saw the heels of two thick shoes, and enough to swear by of two woollen stockings.

In ascending to my room I was met upon the stairs by a smart, pretty girl of nineteen, with a tidy, dumpy figure, a round face, bright, blooming cheeks, glossy, clustering curls, and little merry brown eyes. I need not tell you this was my sister Rose. She is, I know, a comely matron still, and, doubtless, no less lovelyin your eyesthan on the happy day you first beheld her.

The harper presently struck up a livelier strain, when two Welsh girls, who were chatting before the grate, one of them as dumpy as a bag of meal and the other slender and tall, stepped into the middle of the floor and began to dance to the delicious music, a Welsh mechanic and myself drinking our ale and looking on approvingly.