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The least opposition or contradiction threw him into a great rage, and set him screaming, and cursing, and gesticulating like any street drab. When he wished more clothes, which was pretty often, one of his dupes furnished the money. When he wanted cash for any purpose indeed, they gave it him. This half-crazy knave and abominable humbug was Robert Matthews, who called himself Matthias.

But the afternoons were long; and at times the interminable sand-hills and everlasting roar of the sea oppressed the child with a sense of loneliness beyond words. The rabbits and gulls would not make friends with him, and he ached for companionship. Of that ache was born his half-crazy adoration of George Vyell.

'You must remember this is only my second visit, and I have not made much way with her. She is in a state of bodily and mental discomfort very painful to witness. If I am not mistaken, she is driving herself half-crazy with introspection and self-will. You must not give way to this morbid desire to increase her own wretchedness. She needs firmness as well as kindness.

I guess I was half-crazy from the blow, and from the awful wound I'd seen in Pete's chest, because when we closed in on the rendezvous that night I took fool chances. I jumped in alone. Dutch Henry had my life in his hands when Blue Pete fired from the shadows. . . . Somehow he'd dragged himself there to be on hand. He saved my life again. . . . He died for it."

* Always pronounced 'Badgery. Now I think that when we heard this story, and poor Kit Badcock came all around, in a sort of half-crazy manner, not looking up at any one, but dropping his eyes, and asking whether we thought he had been well-treated, and seeming void of regard for life, if this were all the style of it; then having known him a lusty man, and a fine singer in an ale-house, and much inclined to lay down the law, as show a high hand about women, I really think that it moved us more than if he had gone about ranting, and raving, and vowing revenge upon every one.

We had the courses clewed up when the men were alive, and the lower yards were fairly square; so the ship, with the aid of the head-sails, kept the canvas full, and she sailed along, manned by a crew of rabid rats, a crazy first mate, and a half-crazy second mate.

Only then he realised what those poor little orphan children and that pitiful half-crazy Katerina Ivanovna, knocking her head against the wall in her consumption, meant for Sonia. But, nevertheless, it was clear to him again that with her character and the amount of education she had after all received, she could not in any case remain so.

One was that of an apparently half-crazy person named Somerville, who betrayed himself by bragging; the other, the more curious affair of Parry, who got himself introduced into the Queen's presence several times, but "let I dare not wait upon I would" persistently, till he retired with nothing accomplished; to reappear presently.

It was not an immense fortune that Cropole had in perspective; but he might hope to double the thousand louis d'or left by his father, to make another thousand louis by the sale of his house and stock, and at length to live happily like a retired citizen. Cropole was anxious for gain, and was half-crazy with joy at the news of the arrival of Louis XIV.

Yes! this gaunt, half-crazy, overworked peasant, content to rake the dead leaves before the rolling chariots of the Beverdales, was her grandfather; that poorly clad girl in the cottage, and even the menial in the scullery of this very house that might be HERS, were her COUSINS! She burst into a laugh, and then refolded the document and put it away. At luncheon she was radiant and sparkling.