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He could not talk even of Charles Darwin without calling him an imbecile; and his all-round hitting at his closest intimates is simply merciless. The same perversity which made him talk of Keats's "maudlin weak-eyed sensibility" caused him to describe his loyal, generous, high-bred friend Lord Houghton as a "nice little robin-redbreast of a man;" while Mrs.
I did not mean to trouble her, but I was determined not to lose the chance of being Brother of Pity to a robin-redbreast. I dressed myself as well as I could, got out unobserved, and made my way to the summer-house. Things look a little paler by moonlight, otherwise I could see quite well.
She was dressed rather extravagantly in a brown velvet walking-dress, with an absurd little hat, that would have fitted a child, on the top of her dark wavy hair; she only wanted a touch of red about her to look like a magnified robin-redbreast. 'Well, she said impatiently, as I hesitated a moment in my surprise, 'I have told you we have come for a call, Nap and I; but if you are going out
"Then he turned to me and said, 'Fan, do you hear that robin that little mystic robin-redbreast?
"Our thrushes now are silent, Our swallows flown away; But robin's here in coat of brown, And scarlet breast-knot gay." Some time ago I was reading the account which a boy, who had always lived in town, gave of his first sight of a robin-redbreast.
He walked to the window, and stood looking out mutely on the little garden tiny, but so pretty, with its green verandah, its semicircle of arbutus trees serving as a frame to the hilly landscape beyond, its one wavy acacia, woodbine-clasped, at the foot of which a robin-redbreast was hopping and singing over the few fallen leaves.
Well, at last a vessel took me off, and I wasn't sorry for it, for raw rats are not very good eating. I went home again, and I hadn't been on shore more than two hours, when who should I see but my first wife, Bet, with a robin-redbreast in tow. "That's he!" says she. I gave fight, but was nabbed and put into limbo, to be tried for what they call biggery, or having a wife too much.
They bury animals of all sizes in a surprisingly short space of time. If two of them cannot conduct the funeral, they summon others. They carry the bodies, if necessary, to suitable ground. "Then was it the beetles who were burying the robin-redbreast?" I gasped. "I suspect so," said Godfather Gilpin. "But we will go and see."
His women are not Madonnas, or Junos, or Helens they are the incarnation of girlhood; girlhood without care or thought; girlhood in love with a kitten, or weeping over a wounded robin-redbreast." How abominably he rattled on. Was it the overflow of joyous spirits? No doubt. He was so pleased with life and fate, that he was obliged to give vent to his exuberance in this gush of commonplace.
"He waits for a thrush, an ortolan, a beccafico, a robin-redbreast, or any other feathered and diminutive biped. He is not so ambitious as to expect a quail. Partridges he has heard of; of one, at least, a sort of phoenix, reproduced from its own ashes, and seen from time to time before an earthquake, or other great catastrophe.
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