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Francis Jeffrey had been a hack writer in London, had studied medicine, had sought unsuccessfully a government position in India, had written poor sonnets, and was now lounging with but a scanty occupation in the halls of the law courts. Francis Horner had just come to the Scottish bar straight from his studies.
The streets were as nearly deserted as they ever are; here and there a lumbering market-wagon from Jersey, an occasional street-car with its tinkling bell, rarer still the rush of a trembling train on the elevated, the voice of a belated reveler, a flitting female figure at a street corner, the roll of a livery hack over the ragged pavement.
"Oh, by no means!" declared the boy. "There is more fear of the rats eating me than that I shall do them any harm." "It can't be that he is as harmless as he says," thought the brown owl. "All the same I believe I'll make an attempt...." She rose into the air, and in a second her claws were fastened in Nils Holgersson's shoulder and she was trying to hack at his eyes.
"Now, Uncle Clarence, just take Cora's explanation and apology for both of us, will you, for it fits me as well as it does her? And now you two may keep the ball rolling, while I go out and order dinner and engage the hack," said Sylvan, starting for the office. When he was gone Clarence asked Cora to give him all the details of the extraordinary marriage, and she complied with his request.
"But when they hear of a fire they get right to it, if they can, and take rescue scenes, and so forth, then have their contract writers work up a scenario in which the scenes can be used. But that's hack work. Mine is different, you see. My scenario called for a fire, and couldn't be produced without it. Quite different from having a fire call for a scenario. "Well, now you know.
The feverish energy of his temperament, his readiness to respond to every impression, and his thirst for activity, drove him from south to north and hack again, regardless of his health and of the climate. Like all invalids, he ought to have gone on living in the same place, at Nice or at Yalta, until he was better, but he lived exactly as though he had been in good health.
London is like a shelled corn-cob on the Derby day, and there is not a clerk who could raise the money to hire a saddle with an old hack under it that can sit down on his office-stool the next day without wincing. Now just compare the racer with the trotter for a moment. The racer is incidentally useful, but essentially something to bet upon, as much as the thimble-rigger's "little joker."
§ III. In that simple ornament, not as confined to Venetian boats, but as representative of a general human instinct to hack at an edge, demonstrated by all school-boys and all idle possessors of penknives or other cutting instruments on both sides of the Atlantic; in that rude Venetian gunwale, I say, is the germ of all the ornament which has touched, with its rich successions of angular shadow, the portals and archivolts of nearly every early building of importance, from the North Cape to the Straits of Messina.
It is simply an "average view," and you can safely snap it with a "16" stop. The friendly razorback hogs under the mail hack make a picture with a heavy foreground. They fall into the "8" classification half in shade, half in sunlight. The road leads us at last to a river. An old-fashioned ferry boat is making a crossing in midstream.
Suddenly, with a little shiver of joy or of fear, I don't know which, I guessed that it was The Comrade in White. And at that very moment the enemy's rifles began to shoot. The bullets could scarcely miss such a target, for he flung out his arms as though in entreaty, and then drew them hack till he stood like one of those wayside crosses that we saw so often as we marched through France.
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