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The day was dull, the sky and sea lead-colored, the brown coast by degrees lost its distinctness, and became covered with a dark haze that seemed to blend everything into a still, stony, threatening iron-gray mass.
Here and there, a distant vista of the lake shows its surface, alternately sparkling or lead-colored, as the passing cloud or the hour of the day may make it. When I arrived at Aix, the crowd had already left it. The hotels and public places, where strangers and idlers flock during the summer, were then closed.
He wore an old-fashioned, low black satin stock, over the top of which the linen of his unstarched collar contrived with difficulty to make itself seen; his high-crowned, lead-colored straw hat lay on the table before him. At the other end of the table sat a young girl, who leaned upon it with one arm, propping her averted face on her hand.
He was a man of forty-five, gray-haired, misshapen, heavy above the waist and light to meanness below; a man lame in one leg and with an ill-proportioned face, malicious, lined, lead-colored; a man who limped and leaped about the room with a fierce energy, the while his tongue, gifted with a rich and resonant voice, poured vitriol upon the silence. Suddenly the woman spoke.
I looked out on the unruffled lead-colored river: there, about quarter of a mile from the bank, the boat was lying: empty motionless. The oars were floating a few rods from her, drifting slowly, slowly, down the stream. The sight seemed to turn my warm blood and blushes into ice: even before I had a distinct impression of what I feared, I was benumbed.
Yes, he had to admit it he was nervous: and the fact that he was nervous made him hot and uncomfortable. To judge him by his appearance, the man at the window was also hot and uncomfortable. He was a little, truculent-looking man, and his face at present was red with a flush that sat unnaturally on a normally lead-colored face.
A second shelf held a shiny red-and-black peg-top, a black wooden snake beside its lead-colored pipe-like case; a tin soldier in an English uniform red coat, and pill-box cap held on by a chin-strap; a second uniformed tin man who turned somersaults, but in repose stood upon his head; a black dog on wheels, with great floppy ears; and a half-dozen downy ducklings acquired at Easter.
Presently the singer hops up on a dry twig, and gives me a good view: lead-colored head and neck, becoming nearly black on the breast; clear olive-green back, and yellow belly. From his habit of keeping near the ground, even hopping upon it occasionally, I know him to be a ground warbler; from his dark breast the ornithologist has added the expletive mourning, hence the mourning ground warbler.
The sunlight is the glory of it all; it must have quite another attraction that of melancholy under a gray sky and with a lead-colored water foreground. There was not much on the steamboat to distract our attention from the study of physical geography. All the fashionable travelers had gone on the previous boat or were waiting for the next one.
For the twinkling of an eye I beheld above this rising tide of executioners the imperious dignity of the Emperor, master of the scene, self-confident and certain that all men would approve of his decision, magnificent in his military trappings; the incredulous amazement of Perennis, his pale, watery blue eyes bleared in his lead-colored, bloodless face, as he stood dazed and numb; the horror of his bedizened wife and sister, both fleshy women, dark-skinned and normally red-cheeked, now gray with despair, like the two wretched lads beside them; the cruelly feminine relish, as upon the successful fruition of long and tortuous intrigues, blazoned on the faces of Marcia and of Cleander's wife, a very showy woman with golden hair, violet eyes and a delicately pink and white complexion: a similar expression of relished triumph on the broad, fat, ruddy face of her big husband, who looked just what he had been; a man who had started life as a slave; whose master had thought him likely to be most profitably employed as a street porter, in which capacity he had for years carried packs, crates, bales, chests, rafters and such like immensely heavy loads long distances and had thriven on his exertions; who, whatever brains he had since displayed, however much character and merit had contributed to his dazzling rise in life, had retained and still possessed a hearty appetite, a perfect digestion, mighty muscles, hard and solid, all over his hulking frame, and the vast strength of his early prime; all these chief actors framed against a background of gaudily caparisoned officers and courtiers.
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