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"Ha, the last," said the king heartily, "welcome back again!" There was a long pause, and then the stunted archer said, "What do you mean by 'again'? I have never been here before." The king stared for a few seconds, and said, "I sent you out from this room with the four doors last night." After another pause the little man slowly shook his head.

'If light so much conceals, wherefore not life? Let us hold fast by a deeper wisdom than is born of sense; and though men, nowadays, seem to be willing to go back to the 'eternal sleep' of the most unspiritual heathenism, and to cast away all that Christ has brought us concerning that world where He has been and whence He has returned, because positive science and the anatomist's scalpel preach no gospel of a future, let us try to feel as well as to believe that it is life, with all its stunted capacities and idle occupation with baseless fabrics, which is the sleep, and that for us all the end of it is to awake.

The country remained the same, and was extremely uninteresting. The complete similarity of the productions throughout Patagonia is one of its most striking characters. The level plains of arid shingle support the same stunted and dwarf plants; and in the valleys the same thorn-bearing bushes grow. Everywhere we see the same birds and insects.

The result is that the various vital faculties which education might be supposed to train become irretrievably starved and stunted in the over-educated school child; till at last, when the time comes for him to leave the school in which he has been so sedulously cared for, he is too often thrown out upon the world, helpless, listless, resourceless, without a single interest, without a single purpose in life.

We raised our hats as our mules plodded slowly by through the sand. On each grave was a frail wooden cross, and this and the paling round about were already stained by the weather as gray as the tree trunks of the stunted forest that stretched endlessly on every side. The skeletons of mules and oxen were frequent along the road.

This, disintegrating, had formed a gently-curving breast which sloped down to merge with the valley's floor. Willow and witch alder, stunted birch and poplar had found roothold, clothed it, until only their crowding outposts, thrusting forward in a wavering semicircle, held back seemingly by the blue hordes, showed where it melted into the meadows.

Heads were craned out of the car windows, and in rounding every curve Bucks, with the scout Leon Sublette, sitting greatly wrought up behind Stanley and Casement, expected momentarily to see Cheyenne war bonnets spring up out of the stunted cedars that lined the hills along the right of way. But not a sign could be seen of any living thing.

There was no M'SIEUR to that cry now, only a moaning, sobbing prayer filled with his name. "I'm coming, Jeanne!" he shouted. "I'm coming! Hold fast to the canoe!" He ran ahead, stripping off his coat. A little below the first rocks a stunted banskian grew out of an earthy fissure in the cliff, with its lower branches dipping within a dozen feet of the stream.

His face was handsome, and bearded, but swarthier far than his companion's, and the backs of his long fine hands were almost black. Sakr-el-Bahr paid little heed to him. Lying there he looked down the slope, clad with stunted cork-trees and evergreen oaks; here and there was the golden gleam of broom; yonder over a spur of whitish rock sprawled the green and living scarlet of a cactus.

You first traverse a region covered with immense lichen-clothed boulders; next come stretches of heath; then stunted firs: by and by fruit and forest trees begin to make their appearance; next comes the lovely acacia; and last of all the vine, tall and luxuriant, veiling the peasant's cot with its shadow.