United States or Sudan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Truly the traveller, clad in the uniform of a musketeer, as he drew up to the door of the hostelry, did not seem to have spared his horse. Throwing his reins to the landlord, he leaped lightly to the ground. He was a young man of four-and-twenty, and spoke with a slight Gascon accent. "I am hungry, Morbleu! I wish to dine!"
Oliver, not having any desire to scat his skull, whatever that might be, assured the man that he would keep to the road carefully. The moon shone clear in a cloudless sky, covering the wide moor and the broad Atlantic with a flood of silver light, and rendering the road quite distinct, so that our traveller experienced no further difficulty in pursuing his way.
The land was fertile, the soil cultivated, the scenery beautiful. Tall trees the mulberry and the poplar arose in long lines; here and there the cactus stretched forth its thorny arms, and at intervals there appeared the dark green of extensive olive-groves. Behind the traveller there extended a wall of purple hills, and before him arose the giant heights of the Pyrenees.
So Captain Winstanley had to sit quietly by, and see Violet and her lover grouped by his fading wife's sofa, and school himself, as he best might, to endure the spectacle of their perfect happiness in each other's love, and to know that he who had planned his future days so wisely, and provided, like the industrious ant, for the winter of his life had broken down in his scheme of existence, after all, and had no more part in this house which he had deemed his own than a traveller at an inn.
Johnson was very careful about the snow-shoes; they are a sort of wooden patten, fastened on with leather straps; when the ground was quite hard and frozen they could be replaced by buckskin moccasins; each traveller had two pairs of both. These preparations were important, for any detail omitted might occasion the loss of an expedition; they took four whole days.
This was rather too much for a somewhat testy traveller, when he changed his tone, begged me not to embroil him with a powerful neighbour, and promised that we should set out that evening. He at once sent for provisions, fowls, and a small river-fish, sugar-cane, and a fine bunch of S. Thome bananas.
"I once kept a mule," said he, "but some years since it was removed without my permission by a traveller whom I had housed for the night: for in that alcove I keep two clean beds for the use of the wayfaring, and I shall be very much pleased if yourself and friend will occupy them, and tarry with me till the morning."
But most deserts of actual nature are not all flat, nor all sandy; they present a considerable diversity and variety of surface, and their rocks are often unpleasantly obtrusive to the tender feet of the pedestrian traveller. A desert, in fact, is only a place where the weather is always and uniformly fine.
He walked from one end of the room to the other without a pause, like a traveller who, at night, hastens doggedly upon an interminable journey. Now and then he glanced at her. Impossible to know. The gross precision of that thought expressed to his practical mind something illimitable and infinitely profound, the all-embracing subtlety of a feeling, the eternal origin of his pain.
He made no further opposition, but remained fidgeting about the room in the most distracting manner, hindering the preparations of Maurice, stumbling over articles scattered on the floor, now and then stammering out a broken, unintelligible phrase, and altogether seeming wretchedly uncomfortable, yet unwilling to leave until he saw the obstinate traveller in the fiacre which drove him to the railway station.
Word Of The Day