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Sweet thought, pure speech, went hand in hand, clad in nervous, pithy old English, or a "patois" of the French, mellowed and enlarged by their constant use of the liquid Indian tongues, flowing like soft-sounding waters about them, their daily talk came ever welcome to the ear.
Still, now looking back, it seems to me as if I were watching some one else going out in the cold February twilight, and walking from half-past five to half-past six. Only on the beach did I ever bear that stick; and by many touches of the sand it gradually wore down till it became too short for use. Ah, poor old dog, you are grown very stiff and lazy now, and time has not mellowed your temper.
As one blends wine of very old stock with newer brands, so has France been blended and mellowed. A strange cosmic feeling one had, on the top of the great building in that town older than Rome itself, of the continuity of human life and the futility of human conceit. The provincial vanity of modern States looked pitiful in the clear air above that vast stony proof of age.
You have a vague idea of a milch cow as probably a white-plaster animal standing in a butterman's window, and you know nothing of the sweet history of genuine cream, such as Miss Gibbs's: how it was this morning in the udders of the large sleek beasts, as they stood lowing a patient entreaty under the milking-shed; how it fell with a pleasant rhythm into Betty's pail, sending a delicious incense into the cool air; how it was carried into that temple of moist cleanliness, the dairy, where it quietly separated itself from the meaner elements of milk, and lay in mellowed whiteness, ready for the skimming-dish which transferred it to Miss Gibbs's glass cream-jug.
The church had, indeed, an air of great beauty in the morning sunlight. The Renaissance galleries and woodwork, mellowed by time, were dusted by that soft warm glow, and the somewhat sparse congregation, in its magnificently isolated groups, was humanised by it too.
Tell them they may go. Louder, louder, Mr. Lawton. Surely your voice has more strength. My ears have been weary this long time with its clamor." Even today, as I pen these lines, the picture comes back with the same intensity, but little mellowed or softened with the years.
"Of no distemper, of no blast he died, But fell like autumn fruit that mellowed long, E'en wondered at because he dropt no sooner; Fate seemed to wind him up for fourscore years; Yet freshly ran he on ten winters more, Till, like a clock worn out with eating Time, The wheels of weary life at last stood still." Here is another of the same kind from "All for Love": "Gone so soon! Is Death no more?
Yet she did it with so much kindness, and said so many sweet words to blunt the severity of the refusal, that all her lovers became her friends, and each, with affectionate kindness, blended with the bold bearing of one who says what he knows he has courage to perform, promised that his love mellowed into friendship should remain firmly fixed in his heart, and that he would defend its object, should danger cross her path, as long as strength was given him to carry a spear.
Of the past, of the dreadful days on the stained battlefields of the Dardanelles, they spoke little. Some day perhaps when time had mellowed the colors, then this group of young people could talk it over. Just now the price they had paid for their experiences seemed too great. It was all too near.
But his Determinist, almost Calvinistic, views were mellowed and tempered by a serene and deep belief in a providence moving to good, and ordering life down to the smallest details with special reference to each man's case; in fact, as he said, the two were so closely connected that they were like the convex and concave sides of a lens.
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