United States or Fiji ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
To Caleb who, without knowing it, from sheer sympathy was viewing her through the untaught eyes of the boy at his feet, she was no longer a mere slip of a girl-child, dark-eyed, bewildering of mood and pulsingly alive. Caleb caught his first illuminating glimpse of the woman she was to be of the dainty grace and more than usual beauty which was there in the promise of the years.
George-Low-Cedar and none other had written that letter, and Big Turkey himself had probably composed it in great deliberation over his pipe, while the smoke of his tepee fire curled over his head, and his squaw crouched in the shadow listening stolidly while her heart ached with longing for the girl-child who had gone a-wandering.
The beginning of a collection of such dolls is made as soon as a girl is born. Every girl-child is presented with a pair of these dolls, and as time goes on she gathers all the articles which go with them. These dolls are always her own. When she marries she takes them to her new home.
An old lady, with grizzled hair, toothless and distorted in countenance, with legs and arms mere bones, and skin shrunken and parched; a girl-child, perhaps six years old, by no means an ugly little thing, and a youngish man made up the trio; all stark-naked, and unadorned by artificial means, unless one excepts a powerfully scented mixture of grease and ashes, with which their bodies were smeared.
I see again, not far from me, a bed, a child, a girl-child, who is asleep in our house; her eyes are only two lines. Into our house, after a very long time, we have led my old aunt. She approves affectionately, but all the same she said, very quietly, as she left the perfection of our room, "It was better in my time."
And the writer knew of all that had happened at the tavern on the veld, when a human brute had triumphed in his bestiality, and a girl-child had been helpless, and the great white stars had looked down unmoved and changeless upon Innocence destroyed. The Mother read the letter from the loathly beginning to the infamous end. She had been sorely wrought upon of late.
"Do you make a business of killing children?" I cried again, and pointed to the dead body of the girl-child. I don't know who was more surprised, the captain of the Bellonic, listening, or the man John. "You cub," he cried; "if you talk to me I'll skin you alive!" But I said quickly "Gentlemen, these men want every shilling on this ship.
And once during one of the beatings she protested, saying, "Don't strike the child on the head in that way." But the iron had entered into Lydia's sister's soul. The injustice of it all drove gentle Elizabeth's gentleness to the winds. "Liddy darling," she said, taking the thirteen-year-old girl-child into her strong young arms, "I know truth when I hear it. You never stole that cake."
And it's no use your making guns because you can't fire them without gunpowder, and that won't be invented for hundreds of years, and we don't know how to make it, and we can't tell you. Do go straight home, dear Caesar, and let poor little Britain alone. 'But this other girl-child says said Caesar.
"And are you going to make a fisherman of him?" I asked. "No, no, not boy-child, it is girl-child," she answered with some indescribable trick of expression that led me to know she preferred it so. "You are pleased it is a girl?" I questioned in surprise. "Very pleased," she replied emphatically. "Very good luck to have girl for first grandchild.
Word Of The Day