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We look before and after, forwards to some dim utopia, backwards to some ape-like ancestor who links us with the animal world. Our outlook is horizontal, the mediaeval outlook perpendicular. The mediaeval man looked upward and downward, to heaven and hell, when he thought of the future, to sun and cloud, land and crops, when he thought of the present.

The result of such a process of evolution in the case of the communal animals is a strict specialism. A series of acts of advantage to the community are slowly developed, and are repeated so frequently that they become instinctive, while a fixed circle of duties arises, through whose links it is almost impossible to break. There is no reason to believe that the individual initiative is wanting.

The hand of change rests on it all, unfelt, unseen; resting for awhile, as it were half reluctantly, before it grips and ends the thing for ever. One frost and the whole face of things will be bare, links snap, patience end, our fine foliage of pretences lie glowing in the mire. For that we have still to wait a little while.

No human being had ever told her of the mysterious links that reach from the finite to the infinite, out of which, from the buried ashes of dead Superstition, great souls can evoke those mighty spirits, Faith and Knowledge; yet she went to sleep every night believing that she felt, nay, could almost see, an angel standing at the foot of her little bed, watching her with holy eyes, guarding her with outspread wings.

With a thousand important Details claiming his attention, Aleck had no time to monkey with side issues such as the general State of his Health or the multifarious plans for uplifting the Flat-Heads that he could see from his Window. Those who recommended Golf to him seemed to forget that no one ever laid by anything while on the Links.

It is one of the chain of similar Cossack settlements which, called "the line" of the Caucasus, stretches from the mouth of the Kuban to that of the Terek; and as the invaders penetrate further and further into the mountains, they carry this system of Cossack colonies and fort defenses with them, so that the chain forged to bind within its thousand links the liberties of all the tribes is gradually drawn tighter and tighter.

He launcheth forth of the ship a little boat, and the King entereth thereinto, and so cometh into the great ship, and findeth a knight that lay all armed upon a table of ivory, and had set his shield at his head. At the head of his bed had he two tall twisted links of wax in two candlesticks of gold, and the like at his feet, and his hands were crossed upon his breast.

There must, of course, be some primary cerebral excitation, whether that of a present peripheral stimulation, or that which has been termed central and spontaneous; but when once this first link of the imaginative chain is supplied, other links may be added in large numbers through the operation of the forces of association.

The coloured surcoat was both weather-stained and torn, the coat of mail beneath so ancient that many of the links had disappeared completely; the holes where they had been were patched with hide, which also was beginning to give way in places. His age was about three-and-twenty; he had bright brown eyes, a black moustache and beard, and a malicious air.

I determined to pass a week in the Sea-Wood of Graden-Easter, and making a long stage, reached it about sundown on a wild September day. The country, I have said, was mixed sand-hill and links; links being a Scottish name for sand which has ceased drifting and become more or less solidly covered with turf.