United States or Palestine ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A young girl, whose fair oval face the sun of eighteen summers has warmed into exquisite beauty, sits musingly under a cypress tree. Her name is Anna Bonnard, and she is famous in all the city for her beauty, as well as the symmetry of her form. Her dress is snowy white, fastened at the neck with a blue ribbon, and the skirts flowing.
Red Creek was in a fruit-farming and dairy region and looked its prettiest on the spring evening when Cherry saw it first. The locusts were in leaf and ready to bloom, and the first fruit blossoms were scattered in snowy whiteness up and down the valley. Her little house was a cottage with a porch running across the front where windows looked out from the sitting room and the front bedroom.
When the mood comes, I can laugh one of our good old laughs, and no one will think the less of me; the dimples, impressed by Comedy's light fingers on my fair cheeks, will command respect. Or I can let my eyes fall and my heart freeze under my snowy brows. I can pose as a Madonna with melancholy, swan-like neck, and the painters' virgins will be nowhere; my place in heaven would be far above them.
A profusion of snowy shirt-frill rushed impetuously out of his doublet; a black-velvet cloak, lined with amber-satin, fell picturesquely from his shoulders; a sword with a jeweled hilt clanked on the pavement as he walked.
Many other sleds were drawn up before the door; indeed, certain of the young men who had not their especial sweethearts took their ox-sleds and went from door to door collecting the young women. Many a jingling load slipped along the snowy road to the tavern that night, and the ball-room filled rapidly. At eight o'clock the ball opened.
Sometimes they waded up to their knees in icy waters pushing their canoes before them against the rapid current, or again they carried them over long portages, shouldering their way through forest so dense that they could scarcely advance a mile an hour. At night soaked with rain and sleet they slept upon the snowy ground.
It might be that in this splendid boy, who was as beautiful as the Greek Alcibiades, and as brave as the young Bayard, lay the answer to all her prayers for her darling. The bridal white would not be a blasphemy, like the young nun's snowy robe and veil.
And winding down the old road leading to the vale, they find a little dark-eyed girl whose great-great-grandfather was this same Anthony Woolf. And the Revolutionary War was a century and a quarter ago! Here they have lived for generations. The Cousin Jennie has gone, but the tall bright-eyed man who married her is still hale and hearty, with snowy hair and beard.
The steps before Sant' Antonio's shrine are half buried under the great white lilies that bear his name, and the tall dark angels that keep guard about his tomb bear sceptres of fresh lilies. There is no need of the swinging silver censers. Myrrh and frankincense rise, sweet and strong, from the depths of the snowy chalices.
She shook her head, and showed her beautiful teeth an instant in the faint light. Then, rising, half shy, but very firm, "I no wait till summer." He was so appalled for the moment, at the thought of having her on their hands, all this way from Pymeut, on a snowy night, that words failed him. As she watched him she, too, grew grave. "You say me nice girl." "When did I say that?"
Word Of The Day