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"I heard your armour clash as you fell," replied the prisoner, "and now I see it glimmer. When you have remained as long as I in this darkness, your eyes will distinguish the smallest eft that crawls on the floor." "I had rather the devil picked them out!" said Dalgetty; "if this be the case, I shall wish for a short turn of the rope, a soldier's prayer, and a leap from a ladder.
Then Sir Bedivere returned again, and took the sword in his hand; and then him thought sin and shame to throw away that noble sword, and so eft he hid the sword, and returned again, and told to the king that he had been at the water, and done his commandment. What saw thou there? said the king. Sir, he said, I saw nothing but the waters wap and waves wan.
It would have touched a heart, retaining any degree of feeling, to see that young and beautiful woman within that damp and noisome excavation so damp that cold and slimy reptiles clung to, and crept over, its floor and walls, while the blind worm nestled in the old apertures formed to admit a little air; and the foul toad, and still more disgusting eft, looked upon her, as they would say, "Thou art our sister."
'Jehane, my robbed lost soul! he howled, and stabbed with all his might. King Richard, cat-like behind him, caught him by the hair, and cuffed his ears till they sang. 'Ah, dastard cur! Ah, mongrel! Ah, white-galled Norman eft!
"Look here!" and he turned his pretty little self quite round; and, sure enough, he had no more tail than you. The otter might have got out of it by saying that Tom was a frog: but, like a great many other people, when she had once said a thing, she stood to it, right or wrong; so she answered: "I say you are an eft, and therefore you are, and not fit food for gentlefolk like me and my children.
If it were befallen -as will it not our Lord! -that Modred, thy sister's son, had taken thy queen, and set all thy royal land in his own hand, that thou to him committedest, when thou thoughtest to go to Rome; and had he done all this with his treachery, the yet thou mightest thee avenge with weapon worthily, and eft thy land hold, and govern thy people, and thine enemies fell, who did evil to thee, and slay them all clean, that there remain not one."
For, when questions belonging to the most sacred hereditary beliefs of Christendom were supposed to be affected by the verification of a fossil shell, or the proving that the Maestricht "homo diluvii testis" was, after all, a monstrous eft, it became necessary to work upon Conchology, Botany, and Comparative Anatomy, with a care and a reverence, a caution and a severe induction, which had been never before applied to them; and thus gradually, in the last half-century, the whole choir of cosmical sciences have acquired a soundness, severity, and fulness, which render them, as mere intellectual exercises, as valuable to a manly mind as Mathematics and Metaphysics.
And then Sir Tristram feutred his spear, and smote his uncle, King Mark, so sore, that he rashed him to the earth, and bruised him that he lay still in a swoon, and long it was or ever he might wield himself. And then he ran to the one knight, and eft to the other, and smote them to the cold earth, that they lay still.
But the doctor was in search of an able coadjutor just then, blessed with a steady brain and a tongue skilled in tender diplomacies. For there were trying things to be said and done, and he needed a woman of a fine spirit to do and say them aright. "Head like an eft," he said to himself, as course followed course, and, while bandying compliments with her, he watched and listened.
They stopped opposite Amyas; and she of the myrtle wreath, rising and bowing to him and the company, began with a pretty blush to say her say: "Hither from my moorland home, Nymph of Torridge, proud I come; Leaving fen and furzy brake, Haunt of eft and spotted snake, Where to fill mine urns I use, Daily with Atlantic dews; While beside the reedy flood Wild duck leads her paddling brood.
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