United States or Côte d'Ivoire ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Were I to go back to such a life I would choose the danger, and be discontented to maunder on behind the slow and harmless wool-bearers, cursing a little every now and again at their foolishness, and then plodding on once more, bunched up in an inert mass on a slow-going horse, who wearily stretches his neck almost to the ground as he dreams, perhaps, of the long, exhilarating gallops after his own kind that we once had together, being conscious, I daresay, of the contemptuous pity I feel for the slow foredoomed muttons that crawl before us on the long and weary plain.
Then pulling the plumes from their heads, and washing the paint off their faces, they drove their muttons to a different market, sold them, and returned to Chavez to tell a tale of Indian spoliation, and how they themselves had just escaped with their scalps. This is the true history of General Don Manuel Armijo, Governor of New Mexico; at least that of his first beginnings.
Well, Muttons r-run him down, an' was about to plug him, whin th' czar says, 'Hol' on, he says, 'hol' on there, he says. 'Don't shoot, he says. 'Let's talk this over, he says. An' Muttons, bein' a foolish man, waited till th' czar come near him; an' thin th' czar feinted with his left, an' put in a right hook an' pulled off Muttons's face. I tell ye 'tis so.
The French would set up a claim for 'Ancient Lights. The Germans would discover a nebulous Hinterland under their protection. The Americans would protest in the name of the Monroe Doctrine. It is necessary to be modest. Let us return to our muttons." "Everybody will be able to pick a world that suits him," pursued Gazen, still on the trail of his thought.
"You know history, I admit," said Queed, lightly falling upon the side issue, "surprisingly, indeed, considering that you have not read it for so many years." "A man is not likely to forget truths burned into him when he is young." "Everything depends," said Queed, returning to his muttons, "upon how you are going to appraise a civilization.
For all the "gigots" that ever appear at my host's entertainment, one might really think that the muttons of Africa were a peculiar species, a species without legs: crawling, maybe, on their bellies, like Nebuchadnezzar. "Je m'en f de vot' bon-homme," said one of these gentlemen to me, referring to Baedeker, with whose sacred pages I had threatened him.
Now, to return to our muttons a figure which you will appreciate I may now be regarded, I think, as this young lady's legal guardian; although I have not had the honour of being formally appointed such.
"Let some critic of reputation once start the idea, and you'll have the good London folk who won't bother to read him for themselves, declaring him as fine as Shakespeare. The dear English muttons! fine Southdowns! fleecy baa-lambs! once let the Press-bell tinkle loudly enough across the fields of literature, and they'll follow, bleating sweetly in any direction!
But this last title was very rarely indulged in, because it once sent his particular crony, a chuckle-headed clerk in the post-office, into a cachinnatory fit which was "rayther in the apoplectic line." "To return to our muttons."
'Tis curious to reflect, that at the vast baronial feasts, in the days of the Plantagenets and Tudors, where we read of such onslaught of beeves, muttons, hogs, fowl and fish, the courtly knights and beauteous dames had no other vegetable save bread not even a potato! Von Os. "They carved at the meal with their gloves of steel, And drank the red wine through the helmet barr'd." Dov.
Word Of The Day