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Updated: May 23, 2025
As she sat over her geography lesson, out of sight of her own bad writing, her broken-backed illuminated capitals, her lumpy campanulas, crooked-winged fairies, queer perspective, and dabs of blue paint, she saw her performance not as it was, but as it was meant to be, heard her own lines without their awkward rhymes and bits like prose, and thought of the wonder and admiration of all the Wardour family, and of the charms of having it secretly lent about as a dear simple sweet effusion of the talented young countess, who longed for rural retirement.
But industry so vast, working by steam on a limited space, has been fatal to beauty: Hillsborough, though built on one of the loveliest sites in England, is perhaps the most hideous town in creation. All ups and down and back slums. Not one of its wriggling, broken-backed streets has handsome shops in an unbroken row.
New chintzes took the place of his old leather cushions; a big photograph of Minnie stood on the lid of the chronometer case, and the broken-backed Admiralty guides, ocean directories and the rest were reinforced by a brigade of smartly bound novels. "Sit down," said Arthur, "and make yourself at home till they get your dunnage in.
Alice stood back in the shelter of the broken parapet. The highway with its modern crossing-place was some hundreds of yards up stream, but here, at the burn mouth, where the turbid current joined with the cold, glittering Avelin, there was a grass-grown track, and an ancient, broken-backed bridge.
Thus did I suffer for my foolish pride: for had I not been so tenacious of respect from my scholars, they would not upon my sneezing have let go their hold and broken my back. When the broken-backed schoolmaster had finished his story, the old man with the wry-mouth thus began: Story of the Wry-mouthed Schoolmaster.
"That is, I suppose, because you neither see a shepherd or shepherdess wrought in worsted, and handsomely framed in black ebony, or a stuffed parrot, or a breeding-cage, full of canary birds, or a housewife-case, broidered with tarnished silver, or a toilet-table with a nest of japanned boxes, with as many angles as Christmas minced-pies, or a broken-backed spinet, or a lute with three strings, or rock-work, or shell-work, or needle-work, or work of any kind, or a lap-dog with a litter of blind puppies None of these treasures do I possess," she continued, after a pause, in order to recover the breath she had lost in enumerating them "But there stands the sword of my ancestor Sir Richard Vernon, slain at Shrewsbury, and sorely slandered by a sad fellow called Will Shakspeare, whose Lancastrian partialities, and a certain knack at embodying them, has turned history upside down, or rather inside out; and by that redoubted weapon hangs the mail of the still older Vernon, squire to the Black Prince, whose fate is the reverse of his descendant's, since he is more indebted to the bard who took the trouble to celebrate him, for good-will than for talents,
She accepted Clo's suggestion to sit on the bed, which was more comfortable than the one broken-backed chair. Question after question she put, which cost her hostess tiresome flights of imagination to answer. Clo was far from regretting her move, however. If Churn were absent long, or if he went out again, Kit said that she would return as an escape from boredom.
On the last evening of the festival the sultan bestowed dresses of honour on all his courtiers; and on the following day, affairs returning to their usual course, he commanded his vizier to bring before him the three maimed men, and ordered them to relate the cause of their misfortunes, which they did as follows. Story of the Broken-backed Schoolmaster.
The army encamped in an irregular triangular enclosure, on one side being the river, our flanks and face being protected by the gunboats. Our zereba outline was something like a broken-backed pyramid. Whilst the infantry were settling down in camp at Kerreri the cavalry were pushing in the enemy's outposts. The British division cut and built around their front a good stout thorny zereba.
Although I could not get to the window, I was glad when she lay down and spared me the sight of her moving fecklessly about the room or weeping huddled up on a broken-backed wooden chair and looking more like a half-animated dish-clout than a woman. The poor wretch on the bed was a journeyman tailor who, when sober, could earn fair wages.
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