United States or Maldives ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The danger was over in a moment, and he was about to utter his last speech, when the excited young scene-shifter, who had flown up a ladder to repair the damage, leaned over to whisper 'All right', and release Demi from his spread-eagle attitude: as he did so, a hammer slipped out of his pocket, to fall upon the upturned face below, inflicting a smart blow and literally knocking the Baron's part out of his head.
Napoleon, who strove to imitate him 1800 years later, was a charlatan in comparison; a mere scene-shifter on a great theatrical stage. Few traces of his work remain upon humanity to-day. Caesar opened up a pathway for the old civilizations of the world to flow into Western Europe, and the sodden mass of barbarism was infused with a life-compelling current.
There was only one blot but how foul! on Eli Machin's career, and that had been dropped by his daughter Miriam, when, defying his authority, she married a scene-shifter at Hanbridge Theatre. The atrocious idea of being connected with the theatre had rendered him speechless for a time. He could but endure it in the most awful silence that ever hid passionate feeling.
The strain was broken; the audience dissolved in laughter; but it was not hilarious; it was the nervous laughter of relief, touched off by a native humour always present in the dweller of the prairie. "I beg your pardon," said Terry quietly and abstractedly to the audience. And the scene-shifter bethought himself and let down the curtain. The fourth act was not played that night.
The scene-shifter was the Abbé de Pradt, Archbishop of Malines, whom Napoleon sent as ambassador to Warsaw, with elaborate instructions as to the summoning of the Diet, the whipping-up of Polish enthusiasm, the revolutionizing of Russian Poland, and the style of the address to him.
"I am sorry, sir, that you should think I want a bribe to serve you or Mr. Livingstone. It is quite out of my power now. I don't know what you refer to." "I have no time to bargain," Ralph growled, and his eyes began to glisten ominously. "Name your price, and have done with it." There was a hitch here somewhere; the scene-shifter was hardly up to his work, so that it was rather a failure.
Already on the stage of which destiny is the scene-shifter, the fates, in their eternal rôle of call-boy, were summoning the actors to the drama in which the leading rôle was hers and on which the curtain was about to rise. Her father, comforted by the imaginary, looked up. She had gone. From the sling he took his arm. The elbow was stiff, though less stiff than it had been.
That is the one disadvantage of summer: during the whole of that otherwise happy season, Barbara expects me to be something between a scene-shifter and a Furniture Removing Van. The chairs were fetched from a far-off summer house and we settled down. Jaffery lit his pipe, smiled at Doria, and met a very wistful look. He held her eyes for a space, and laid his great hand very gently on hers.
The two managers, or rather ex-managers, at once rose and stared strangely at the speaker. They were more excited than they need have been, that is to say, more excited than any one need be by the announcement of the suicide of a chief scene-shifter. They looked at each other. They, had both turned whiter than the table-cloth. At last, Debienne made a sign to Mm.
But whilst he believed himself one of the managers, called upon to divide the receipts, he was but a scene-shifter with a stated salary. The moment of this denouement having come, his so-called partners disappeared through a trap-door with the cash, leaving him alone, as they say, to face the music." "If that's the case," replied the young girl, "why didn't my father speak?" "What was he to say?"
Word Of The Day