United States or Solomon Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Up in this region we met massed acres of lumber rafts coming down but not floating leisurely along, in the old-fashioned way, manned with joyous and reckless crews of fiddling, song-singing, whiskey-drinking, breakdown-dancing rapscallions; no, the whole thing was shoved swiftly along by a powerful stern-wheeler, modern fashion, and the small crews were quiet, orderly men, of a sedate business aspect, with not a suggestion of romance about them anywhere.
"'Now, my lads, said he, addressing some invisible personages, 'we know you are here, and I call upon you to yield in the King's name resistance is useless, the house is surrounded, and we are in force, so you had better give in without more ado. "No answer was returned to this exordium; but we heard the murmuring of muffled voices, as if the rapscallions were deliberating.
You rapscallions will take no care of yourselves, in spite of all that I can say, but will eat and drink as if you were ostriches. He's probably a little off his feed, and a good dose of bluemass followed up with quinine will bring him around all right. Here, take these, and give them to him."
Strangely enough, in the grand surroundings, too much of the Northern pettiness came to the surface in them. One was continually tempted to call out to the ladies, in Holberg's words: "Hold your peace, you good women!" and to the men: "Go away, you rapscallions, and make up your quarrels!"
If the rapscallions didn't fire a whole plathoon, as serjeant Joyce calls it, right at the Knoll, my name is not Michael O'Hearn, or my nature one that dales in giving back as good as I get." "But the volley came first from the house why did my father order his people to make the first discharge?" "For the same r'ason that he didn't.
Then there were the human pensioners, men and women of any belief, who came periodically for food. They worshipped Molly Healy. But her kingdom was over the ragamuffins and rapscallions of the town, with whom she stood on the friendliest terms. "Sure, I am reforming the imps," she was accustomed to say. But it was a notorious fact that her young proteges rarely developed into moral perfection.
The sentry at the door would have sent them off without further ado, but, hearing their noise, the Heer Governor came to the door. "So, so, young rapscallions," he cried, "you, too, must needs disturb the peace and push yourself forward into public quarrels! Get you gone! I will have none of your words.
You should have marched, like me, with a rope round your neck, travelling to your grave in the living body, and seen their horrid sacramental forms and hangman's ceremonies and then, at every reluctant step, as the struggling feet were thrust forward, to see the infernal machine, on which I was to be elevated, glaring more and more hideously in the blaze of a noonday sun and the hangman's rapscallions watching for their prey and the horrible psalm-singing the cursed twang still rings in my ears and the screeching hungry ravens, a whole flight of them, who were hovering over the half-rotten carcass of my predecessor.
So, so, so, then: softly, softly! That's it that's it! long and strong. Give way there, give way! The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull. Pull, will ye? pull, can't ye? pull, won't ye? Why in the name of gudgeons and ginger-cakes don't ye pull? pull and break something! pull, and start your eyes out!
It's cheap coin, is civility, and kindness is a nice bank to fund it in, Squire: for it comes back with compound interest. He used to call Josiah, Jo, and brother Eldad, Dad, and then yoke 'em both together, as "spalpeens," or "rapscallions," and he'd vex them by calling mother, when he spoke to them of her, the "ould woman," and Sally, "that young cratur, Sal."
Word Of The Day