United States or Canada ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


There he found the Squire busy as usual with one of those fresh cargoes of books which always accompanied him on any homeward journey. He was more brown, more wrinkled, more shrunken; more full of force, of harsh epigram, of grim anecdote than ever.

She gazed dully at the unconscious breathing form of the man who had been friend, and companion, and lover, during five years of youth too vigorous and hopeful to be warped by uneven fortune. It was wasted by disease; the face was shrunken; the night-garment hung loosely about a body which had never been disfigured by flesh, but had been muscular with exercise and full-blooded with health.

His natural hideousness was increased by the accidents of a long and irregular career; his short hair was soiled with mud; one could scarcely distinguish beneath the various splashes his gray fur robe striped with black. He was so thin as to be nearly transparent, so shrunken that one could count his ribs, and so dispirited that a mouse might have beaten him.

At that time there were several other tributaries of no mean size, such as the Des Moines, which filled valleys, one or two miles wide, but now represented only by shrunken streams. The most interesting portion of our study refers to the ancient eastern tributaries, and the head waters of the great river.

That was because the paper was contracting and trying to bring the dimensions of the room I own to fit it. In the morning the room had shrunken so that the carpet did not fit, and the paper hung in large molasses-covered welts on the walls. It looked real grotesque. I got a paper-hanger to come and look at it. He did so. "And what would you advise me to do with it, sir?"

Mention of Padre Marcos, sight of him, had always occasioned Madeline a little indefinable shock; and now, as he stepped to the porch, a shrunken, stooped, and sad-faced man, she was startled. The padre bowed low to her. "Senora, will you grant me audience?" he asked, in perfect English, and his voice was low-toned and grave.

The sunshine filtered through half-closed green blinds at the long windows. Up on the platform there sat Professor Carberry, a little, shrunken figure in black broadcloth, the lean, scholarly old face, blanched with the snows of eighty-odd years, filled with eagerness as he looked down on the little assembled remnant of the old guard.

During the earlier ages the river filled all this intermediate space; and the sides of the hills, polished, worn, blackened to their very summits, still bear unmistakable traces of its action. Wasted and shrunken within the deeps of its own ancient bed, the stream now makes a way through its own thick deposits of mud.

More than once, whenever Strang's recuperation permitted, Linday put him under the anæsthetic and did terrible things, cutting and sewing, rewiring and connecting up the disrupted organism. Later, developed a hitch in the left arm. Strang could lift it so far, and no farther. Linday applied himself to the problem. It was a case of more wires, shrunken, twisted, disconnected.

No trace of intelligence remained upon that brow, nor in any feature; nor was there in that flabby flesh either color or the faintest appearance of circulating blood. Here was a shrunken, withered creature brought to the state of those monsters we see preserved in museums, floating in alchohol.