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Not that he ever counted them, as you may suppose, any more than I have done; but this is as near an approach as can be made by calculation to the size of those fabulous blood-fishes, which are the 3,200th part of an inch in diameter. These littlest fishes are called globules; but they are not exactly shaped like little globes, as the word would lead you to suppose.
If they are met with in connection with historical facts, fabulous legends or fanciful traditions are mingled with them: Priam appears as a predecessor of Pharamond; Clodion, who passes for having been the first to bear and transmit to the Frankish kings the title of "long-haired," is represented as the son, at one time of Pharamond, at another, of another chieftain named Theodemer; romantic adventures, spoiled by geographical mistakes, adorn the life of Childric.
Whitney had not yet taught how the raw material might be furnished in quantities almost fabulous. Arkwright had not yet taught how it might be worked up with a speed and precision which seem magical. The whole annual import did not, at the end of the seventeenth century, amount to two millions of pounds, a quantity which would now hardly supply the demand of forty-eight hours.
There was something very French in this alms given to the young, hungry, starved intellect. Circulating libraries were not as yet; if you wished to read a book, you were obliged to buy it, for which reason novels of the early part of the century were sold in numbers which now seem well-nigh fabulous to us. But the poetry of this terrible mart appeared in all its splendor at the close of the day.
His transient indisposition served as no warning to the people; neither did the odor of the smoke that they had been forced to shield their noses from. Had they not seen him swallow fire and belch forth smoke? Had they not seen him during the stage of exhilaration? They all wished to pass through a similar experience, but tobacco was scarce and held at a fabulous price.
The subserviency of fish to the osprey was noted by the ancients, who attributed a fabulous power of fascination to the bird so that as it flew over the ponds the fish "turned their glistering bellies up" that it might take liberal choice. Certainly some limitation on the part of the fish seems to operate in favour of the osprey, otherwise the clumsy fisher would oft go hungry.
But our belief, if it is one, is just as fabulous, just as much a projection of human nature into material things; and if we renounce all positive conception of quasi-mental principles in nature, and reduce our moralizing of her to a poetic expression of our own sensations, then can we say that our verbal and illusive images are comparable as representations of the life of nature to the precision, variety, humour, and beauty of the Greek mythology?
It is in this condition that the lay journals find argument for their stories of premature burial, and from the same source the fabulous "sleeping girls" of the newspapers arise. Dana says that some persons are in the habit of going into a mesmeric sleep spontaneously.
How many, how many there were! The smaller ones, costing from fifty centimes to a franc apiece, were piled up in fabulous numbers. M. de Guersaint, desirous of getting at the exact figures, quite lost himself in the puzzling calculation he attempted.
Loris himself, stimulated by reports of the fabulous wealth which Bensef was said to possess, led the charge and took an active part in the attack. When he left the house it was because he could conceal no more of the booty about his person.
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