United States or Czechia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Then we understand that this host whose fountain-head is out of sight is being frightfully cannonaded by our 75's; the shells set off behind us and arrive in front of us. In the middle of the lilliputian ranks the giant smoke-clouds leap like hellish gods. We see the flashes of the shells which are entering that flesh scattered over the earth.

Chenedolle, whose verse Madame de Stael said to be as lofty as Lebanon, and whose fame is lilliputian to-day, was, with Ducis, the representative of their advance-guard. In painting, with Fragonard, Greuze and Gros, there was a greater stir of genius, yet without anything corresponding in the sister art.

I reflected what a mortification it must prove to me to appear as inconsiderable in this nation as one single Lilliputian would be among us.

"You can feel and hear them all about you though they keep well hidden. A million eager eyes are watching, Lilliputian armies lie in ambush beneath the leaves. How quiet they are now that we have stopped moving, but as soon as we go on the hurry and skurry will break out afresh! We are the invading army and the fairies fly to help the wood-folk protect their homes."

At the moment of my departure, I find within myself only a smile of careless mockery for the swarming crowd of this Lilliputian curtseying people laborious, industrious, greedy of gain, tainted with a constitutional affectation, hereditary insignificance, and incurable monkeyishness. Poor cousin Number 415! how right I was to have held him in good esteem!

Jerry industriously puffed away; Alick stared up unblinkingly into a chink of blue between the tree-tops; and Ned gravely whittled away at a tiny boat of wood, one of a fleet with which he kept Miss Queenie so numerously supplied that it bade fair to develop into a Lilliputian navy in time.

These lilliputian alleys can hardly be considered in good taste, but it is most remarkable with what a large quantity of beautiful fruit the tiny branches are laden. Besides these toys we also observed figures of all descriptions, representing ships, birds, fish, pagodas, etc., cut out of foliage. In the heads of the animals were stuck eggs, with a black star painted on them to represent the eyes.

But to return to Venice; the great stream of concourse flowed in the direction of the Giardini Pubblici, which are a nook of one of the more southerly islands on which the city stands, fitted up as a miniature landscape, its lilliputian hills and vales being the only ones the Venetians ever see.

Amid this ever-shifting panorama, giving it life and beauty, covering pool and channel with merry, restless knots of diving, feeding, coquetting, quarreling swimmers, relieving the colorless ice with groups of jetty velvet and scoter ducks, gray and white-winged coots, crested mergansers in their gorgeous spring plumage, and fat, lazy black ducks, with Lilliputian blue and green winged teal, filling the air with the whirr of swift pinions, and the ceaseless murmur of the mating myriads, rested from their long northward journey, a host such as mortal eye hath seldom beheld, and which it hath fallen to the lot of few sportsmen to witness and enjoy.

Other fragments of skilful handiwork, chiefly meant for machinery on a Lilliputian scale, were strewn about the floor; and on a chair, just as he had left it that morning, stood a loom, very small in size, but perfect in its neat workmanship, with a few threads already woven, making some fabric not so very unlike cloth.