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Mrs. Clyde would hasten to the door to find Blue Bonnet decked from hat brim to stirrups with trailing vines in gorgeous hues, goldenrod and chrysanthemums tied in huge bunches to her saddle. Nor was Chula neglected. Often she sported a flaming wreath her mane bunches of flowers. "Take all the flowers in," Blue Bonnet would call to Delia. "This week will see the very last of them.

I now comprehended how it was that the Count de Gabalis peopled his mystic world with sylphs, beautiful beings whose breath of life was lambent fire, and who sported forever in regions of purest ether and purest light. The Rosicrucian had anticipated the wonder that I had practically realized. How long this worship of my strange divinity went on thus I scarcely know. I lost all note of time.

That same evening, when the drum beat to quarters, the sailors went sullenly to their guns, and the old tars who still sported their beards stood up, grim, defying, and motionless, as the rows of sculptured Assyrian kings, who, with their magnificent beards, have recently been exhumed by Layard.

He had not therefore the courage to tell the Jews, that justice forbad, and he would not condemn the guiltless. What had he to do with justice, who had often sported with it, to gratify his passions, or gain his selfish purposes? Who had done it openly, and it was matter of public notoriety? The Jews urged, "if thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar's friend."

Martin observes "It was said we had just assumed a place among the independent nations in consequence of our opposition to the attempts of Great Britain to enslave us; that this opposition was grounded upon the preservation of those rights to which God and nature has entitled us, not in particular, but in common with all the rest of mankind; that we had appealed to the Supreme Being for his assistance, as the God of freedom, who could not but approve our efforts to preserve the rights which he had thus imparted to his creatures; that now, when we had scarcely risen from our knees, from supplicating his mercy and protection in forming our government over a free people, a government formed pretendedly on the principles of liberty, and for its preservation, in that government to have a provision, not only of putting out of its power to restrain and prevent the slave trade, even encouraging that most infamous traffic, by giving the States the power and influence in the Union in proportion as they cruelly and wantonly sported with the rights of their fellow-creatures, ought to be considered as a solemn mockery of, and insult to, that God whose protection we had thus implored, and could not fail to hold us up in detestation, and render us contemptible to every true friend of liberty in the world.

Then came a rare run for five sweet miles down a long valley over quick-set hedges, with stiffish streams another hill a great combe a lovely valley stretching out a swerve to the right over a gate and the brush got at a farmhouse door. Surely, he had seen it all; but what kink of the brain was it that the men wore flowing wigs and immense boot-legs, and sported lace in the hunting-field?

Perhaps Nature sported or blundered, and this combination ought not to have existed; I only know it did exist. Let every one argue on the point as he pleases, and gravely prove that this cannot be; my business is to declare the truth, and not to enforce a belief of it.

At a bugle call from the Presidente's box, the main gate swung wide and the cuadrilla entered, a band of lithe, slender, clean-shaven men, in slippers, white stockings, knee breeches, and jackets of silk ornamented with silver, each wearing the little queue and black rosette attached thereto that from time immemorial Andalusian toreadores have sported.

It did not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor soar like the larger hawks, but it sported with proud reliance in the fields of air; mounting again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, and then recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never set its foot on terra firma.

One young fellow sported a bright-coloured Mackinaw blanket jacket; another wore a red knit sash, with tasselled ends; a third's fancy ran to a bright bandana about his neck. Head-gear, too, covered wide variations of broader or narrower brim, of higher or lower crown; and the faces beneath those hats differed as everywhere the human countenance differs.