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This hard-headed humorist, whose strange conceits, drollery, and bon-hommie, diverted the young patricians, whilst the rumor of his sayings and quibbles gets abroad every day, turns out, in a sequel, to have a probity as invincible as his logic and to be either insane, or, at least, under cover of this play, enthusiastic in his religion.
In the nooks of England there are not a few of them yet to be found in all their froward glory; and in the most busy cities, though the great prominences of their eccentricities are rubbed off by daily concussion with men as hard-headed as themselves, we see glimpses beneath the polished surface of what they would be in ruder and custom-freer scenes.
He was amused by the wild rumors, for he had, in truth, come to England with no deep-laid scheme or motive, but simply because his daughter had ordered his doing so; for while Abraham Windsor ruled the shares market and the world of speculation, a certain young woman ruled him, and the hard-headed man of affairs, who could outwit an Israelite banker, was as wax under her dainty fingers.
"Now that you are crying," exclaimed Samuel, thoroughly angry, "you are not only hard-headed, but also silly, simply silly! 'Long of hair but short of sense. To cry and cry, and not know wherefore!" With this Samuel turned towards us, and began to plead his case. "Have you ever seen such a cry-baby?
It decides pretty early in any large community, and classifies its members accurately, reversing very often the verdict of the juries of matrons, who do so much to make or mar our early fates. Soon or late it sifts the mass, knows who are the thorough, trustworthy, competent, hard-headed practitioners, who are the timid, who the too daring, who ride hobbies, and who trust too much to drugs.
No, I believe in the rough-and-tumble school to make hard-headed men." "Well, for all you know, Christopher may be a genius, or be born with a golden spoon in his mouth." The other looked up sharply. "Nevil has a boy of his own, hasn't he?" "Don't be a fool if you can help it, Peter. Other people have golden spoons besides the gilded Aston family." Peter shrugged his shoulders.
In their different ways they were hard-headed, experienced men; yet neither of them suspected for a moment that there was anything wrong. Both were honestly convinced that Folco had been a model husband to his dead wife, and a model father to her lost son.
But although some of the hard-headed, money-making men of Caxton joined the movement started by the boasting old soldier and although for the moment they vied with him in stealthy creepings through the streets to secret meetings and in mysterious mutterings behind hands the movement subsided as suddenly as it had begun and only left its leader more desolate.
"They wouldn't if they knew what you are doing now. Just because a busy old bachelor of a lawyer, immersed in hard-headed affairs, doesn't throw all aside and come here to welcome you and behave like a family man, you repudiate him altogether." "She said they didn't either of them want me." The voice was a wail. "But you weren't anything to them but a name." "I'm their own flesh and blood."
But I came of a hard-headed stock which had been away from the soil long enough to gain a new perspective. When a thing satisfied my judgment, I did it forthwith and downright, no matter how extravagant it seemed. Take the old orchard. Worthless! Worse than worthless! Old Calkins nearly died of heart disease when he saw the devastation I had wreaked upon it. And look at it now.
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