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How many of you are quite indifferent to the preaching of a judgment to come, or only conscious of a movement of dislike! But how foolish this is! If a man builds a house on a volcano, is it not kind to tell him that the lava is creeping over the side? Is it not kind to wake, even violently, a traveller who has fallen asleep on the snow, before drowsiness stiffens into death?
Arthur always starts in easy and stiffens up as he goes along. He has pitched two games in an afternoon, and won both. They do say he was better at the end of the eighteen innings than when he started. Yes, please don't take snap judgment on our poor pitcher. There, did you see how Joe Danvers nearly broke his back trying to hit a ball that didn't come within a foot of the plate.
The bow, the welcome, and the introductory remarks passed rapidly as the pull at two sides of a curtain opening on a scene that stiffens courtliness to hard attention. After the names of Admiral Baldwin and 'the Mr. Woodseer, the name of Whitechapel was mentioned by Lady Arpington. It might have been the name of any other place.
And let me tell you, sir, that Captain Whalley, poor man, is by no means useless. Fact. Let me explain to you, sir. He stiffens up that old monkey of a Malay, who knows well enough what to do. Why, he must have kept captain's watches in all sorts of country ships off and on for the last five-and-twenty years.
I think you do not know me as a man that has a very hot hunger for praise. But the coldness with which the world is wont to convince certain people that they do not suit it, if not deadly, yet stiffens one with chill. I am not astonished that all I have written lately does not please you.... At best, a passage here and there may have cheated you by recalling our better days.
What would you find to thrill you in, 'It was the season in which the reapparelled earth, more than in all the other year, shows herself fair'? The rhythm is lost; the flow, sweet as the first runnings of the maple where the woodpecker has tapped it, stiffens into sugar, the liquid form is solidified into the cake adulterated with glucose, and sold for a cent as the pure Vermont product."
But as a man grows older, as his work stiffens and weakens, he falls out of the race, and he must be content to do so; and he is well advised if he puts his failure down to his own deficiencies, and not to the malice of others.
It is almost as though at some period in the past the unconscious mind of the race had made a hasty inventory of experience, committed itself to a premature classification that allowed of no revision, and saddled the inheritors of its language with a science that they no longer quite believed in nor had the strength to overthrow. Dogma, rigidly prescribed by tradition, stiffens into formalism.
Unfortunately, however, he had once or twice lost heavily in an unexpected rally, and he greatly desired to recoup himself. Then, he had decided, nothing would tempt him to take part in another deal. "If I hold on and the market stiffens further I'll be awkwardly fixed," he said. "Wyllard made a will, and in a few months I'll have to hand everything over to his executors.
"I cannot piece the leg as the doctor can; I cannot nurse him as well as his wife does; I may talk to him, but he no more understands me than I do the language of the alchemists. My coming puts him out; he stiffens himself into an uncomfortable posture, out of respect to the cloth, and dare not take the comfort of kicking, and swearing, and scolding his wife, while I am there.
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