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"I wanted to sometimes, but the folks here were so dreadful good to me I couldn't," confessed Ben, secretly surprised to find that the prospect of going off with Daddy even cost him a pang of regret, for the boy had taken root in the friendly soil, and was no longer a wandering thistle-down, tossed about by every wind that blew.
But they have some little weight, after all, and seldom float around in the air, so to speak, of their own accord, but only where currents of air are kept stirred up and moving, without much opportunity to escape, and especially where there is a good deal of dust floating, to the tiny particles of which they seem to cling and be borne about like thistle-down.
No sooner had she spoken than she felt herself raised from her place and borne away out of the crowded room in which she was, out, out into the world, as free as the air itself, and being carried along as though she were a piece of light thistle-down on the back of a summer breeze.
Falconer smilingly leaned forward and touched her lips to Amy's forehead. The caress was as light as thistle-down perhaps no warmer. "Three entire days!" she said chidingly. "It has been three months," and she searched through Amy's eyes onward along the tortuous little passages of her heart as a calm blue air might search the chambers of a cold beautiful sea-shell.
She occupied, with a girl companion, a beautifully painted and ornamented canoe, which had slipped up to him with the lightness of a thistle-down. As the young soldier caught sight of her she was in the very act of tossing a paddle into his own helpless craft.
We are like billiard balls in a game played by unskilful players, continually being nearly sent into a pocket, but hardly ever getting right into one, except by a fluke. ii We are like thistle-down blown about by the wind up and down, here and there but not one in a thousand ever getting beyond seed-hood. iii
She drew the boat down to the water, picked out of it a light, silver-mounted paddle, stepped deftly aboard, and settled down to her place with the airy grace of a thistle-down. There was no seat in the boat, Plonville noted with astonishment. The sea was very smooth, and a few strokes of the paddle sent girl and craft out of sight along the coast. Plonville drew a deep breath of bewilderment.
Three weeks afterwards the "Oriole" drove up to grandpapa Parlin's again, and this time for the Cliffords. Flyaway danced into it like a piece of thistle-down. Everybody threw good-by kisses, and the stage rattled away. And after that, dears, as Flyaway will say to her grandchildren, "things went into a mist."
But Thumbelina could not sleep that night; so she got out of bed, and plaited a great big blanket of straw, and carried it off, and spread it over the dead bird, and piled upon it thistle-down as soft as cotton-wool, which she had found in the field-mouse's room, so that the poor little thing should lie warmly buried. 'Farewell, pretty little bird! she said.
Pointing to the advancing troops, he said that when those miserable hirelings were scattered like thistle-down before the wind, the entire country would be with him, and the Banda Oriental, after half a century of degradation, free at last and for ever from the Brazilian curse. Waving his sword, he galloped back to the front of his column, greeted by a storm of vivas.
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