United States or Sierra Leone ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


After Hulsen's fine explosion on the Durrenberg, August 20th, on the incompetent Reichs Generals, there had followed nothing eminent; new futilities, attemptings and desistings, advancings and recoilings, on the part of the Reich; Hulsen solidly maintaining himself, in defence of his Torgau Magazine and Saxon interests in those regions, against such overwhelming odds, till relief and reinforcement for them and him should arrive; and gaining time, which was all he could aim at in such circumstances.

Poor mortals with their superstitions! Whoever lay there, though, had the best of it, no clammy sepulchre among other hideous graves carved with futilities just a rough stone, the wide sky, and wayside blessings!

Receiving no orders from Germain, and having no initiative of his own, he had made no attempt to hold the line of the Hudson all the way north to Albany, where he could have met Burgoyne and completed the union of the forces which would have cut the Colonies in two. Meanwhile Burgoyne, ignorant of Germain's neglect and Howe's futilities, was struggling to his fate at Saratoga, north of Albany.

But there was an older love than Elizabeth Schuyler: a ragged poverty-stricken creature by this, cowering before dangers within and without, raving mad at times, imbecile at others, filling her shattered body with patent nostrums, yet throughout her long course of futilities and absurdities making a desperate attempt to shade the battered lamp of liberty from the fatal draught.

Anne didn't know its eccentricity was the result of breakage, but she saw it was quite unlike other noses and found it superior to them. Alston Choate spent every waking minute of his life in the practice of law and the reading of novels; he was either digging into precedent, expounding it, raging over its futilities, or guiltily losing himself in the life of books.

It was not until she had spent that heart-tearing five minutes at her father's bedside, while she talked cheerful little encouraging futilities in a voice dry with the effort she had to make to keep it from breaking, that she saw her aunt and felt grateful for Doctor Darby's warning.

Hence that insatiable thirst to see and observe every thing, that inconstancy and want of changing from one place to another, that desire to read useless and frivolous books, novels, weeklies and magazines, which for the most part enervate the mind by their futilities, trouble and darken it by a multitude of incoherent images and contradictory thoughts, and poison the heart by foul and filthy images that will constantly torment the soul.

Petersburg society, the reception afternoons of two of them being especially attractive: they were, indeed, in the nature of the French salons under the old regime. One of these ladies the Princess Wolkonsky seemed to interest all men not absorbed in futilities; and the result was that one heard at her house the best men in St. Petersburg discussing the most interesting questions.

All turned now to the Undertaker's Apprentice, a grim, saturnine figure with his grey face, protuberant eyes, and obsequious solemnity, in which lurked a callous smile. The burial of the great, the execution of the wicked, were alike to him. In him Fate seemed to personify life's revenges, its futilities, its calculating ironies.

Yes, it is vanished, that focus of futilities, that wonderful Season, that phantasmagoria of absurdities, of abortive ambitions, over which a hundred humourists have made merry: it is dead, with its splendours and jubilations and processions dead as the ropes of roses in St. James's street.