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Something keener than philosophy, subtiler than Epicurus, pricked Fred, as Minnie vanished into the cloud of snowflakes. "Pshaw!" He glanced around the apartment. It was still luxurious; but "custom had staled the infinite variety" of its ornament and furnishing. Already he was dissatisfied with this and that.
Still the Indians ate, voraciously, wolfishly, as though they could never get enough. It was not a meal but an endurance contest. Occasionally some wag would push forward the pockmarked brave and demand of Dud that he baptize him again, and always the puncher made motions of going through the performance a second time. The joke never staled.
The old tree's variety never staled; it had mainmast, foremast, top-gallant mast, and he could always come down by the halyards or ropes of the swing.
"'Tis true, sweetheart, that some men are like that," I replied, gently, "but not Hugo Gottfried, surely. When did you ever find me unkind, unthankful, unfaithful? When went I ever away and left you alone?" "Oh, you did you did," she cried, the tears starting from her lovely eyes, "or I should never have been insulted treated lightly, spoken to as a staled thing of courts and camps!"
Thy wit is a little gone by in these fastidious days thy topics are staled by the "new-born gauds" of the time: but great thou used to be in Public Ledgers, and in Chronicles, upon Chatham, and Shelburne, and Rockingham, and Howe, and Burgoyne, and Clinton, and the war which ended in the tearing from Great Britain her rebellious colonies, and Keppel, and Wilkes, and Sawbridge, and Bull, and Dunning, and Pratt, and Richmond, and such small politics.
One of the great joys of such times of retirement perhaps the greatest of the joys is the return, freshened and sweetened, to the common life. How good then appear the things of the garden and farm, the house and shop, that weariness had staled; how good the faces of friends.
In Selby, staled and callous long since to all those infirmities of the wits or the purse which are carried to a consul as to a physician, there awoke at sight of her all that was genial and protective in his sore and shriveled soul; in Waters, who shall say what visions and interpretations? She looked from one to the other of them with her trustful eyes.
Breakfast is never a loquacious meal, and for a while silence reigned, broken only by a few desultory remarks as to the vileness of the food produced by the officer responsible for the mess catering, and the exorbitant price he demanded for it statements which had staled with much vain repetition. "For heaven's sake dry up," he remarked peevishly.
Half the marvels of my morning, triumphs over time and space, Staled by frequence, shrunk by usage, into commonest commonplace! Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good, And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud. Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the Time, City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?" Am I unduly pessimistic?
An ordinary enough thing now, when custom has staled it and the many faults in the system have become visible; but, printing once invented, school boards could no more be held back than the eventual express railway engine once Hero of Alexandria had made his little experiments with a steam kettle. About the benefit of either there may be two opinions, but none about their inevitability.