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To that the soul travelled, halting once and again on the hill-tops to strip off the green leaves in which the mourners had clad it. Here and there by the wayside some lingering ghost would tie a knot in the ribbon-like leaves of the flax plant such knots as foreigners hold to be made by the whipping of the wind. As the souls gathered at their goal, nature's sounds were hushed.
Others have described the spider monkey as four legs and a tail, tied in a knot in the middle: but the tail is, without doubt, the most important of the five limbs. Wherever the monkey goes, whatever she does, the tail is the standing-point, or rather hanging-point.
While doing this, bruin was advancing rapidly on the boy, who kept circling the torch until the beast was within ten feet, by which time the stick was blazing as though it were a pine knot.
They kept good order and a similitude of quiet for so many, except far to the rear, where old Wilkerson was bringing up the tail of the procession, dragging a wretched yellow dog by a slip-noose fastened around the poor cur's protesting neck, the knot carefully arranged under his right ear.
This little knot seemed fierce for action, fiery and panting with that wolfish thirst, to quench which blood must flow. But all the rest seemed dumb, and tongue-tied, and crest-fallen. The sullenness of fear brooded on every other face. The torpor of despairing crime, already in its own fancy baffled and detected, had fallen on every other heart.
It was his brother, I suppose, who taught him to abhor it; and perhaps it was his own suffering from it in part; for he, too, sometimes shed bitter tears over such a knot, as I have seen hapless little wretches do, tearing at it with their nails and gnawing at it with their teeth, knowing that the time was passing when they could hope to hide the fact that they had been in swimming, and foreseeing no remedy but to cut off the sleeve above the knot, or else put on their clothes without the shirt, and trust to untying the knot when it got dry.
No one wished to see him condemned as guilty save those few who seemed determined to send him to the gallows. Three or four possible witnesses were called, but nothing of any importance was gleaned from them; then Borkins was summoned to the table. As he pushed past 'Toinette's chair from the knot of villagers which surrounded him, his face was white, and his lips compressed.
It was Jim who discovered the car coming up the orchard lane. "For de lub o' Mike!" he exclaimed aloud. "Ef here don't come Mikky hisse'f, and her! Hold up dar, Mister preacher. Don't tie de knot till dey gits here!" And a cheer arose loud and long and echoed through the trees and over the river to the sea. Three cheers for the love of Michael!
Lee Virginia imagined all this to be a savage self-accusation which sprang from long self-bereavement, and yet there was something terrifying in its brutal frankness. She stood in silence till her mother left the room, then went to her own chamber with a painful knot in her throat. What could she do with elemental savagery of this sort?
It was theirs to cut the Gordian knot, to break with the past, and, regardless of the jealousies and antagonisms of individual States, to establish the more perfect union, which has been declared by an eminent British statesman "the greatest work ever struck off at a given time from the brain and purpose of man." The oft-quoted expression of Gladstone is, however, more rhetorical than accurate.
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