Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 26, 2025
The low stone guard-wall of old Clopton bridge, built a hundred years before by rich Sir Hugh, sometime Mayor of London, was lined with straddling boys, like strawberries upon a spear of grass, and along the low causeway from the west across the lowland to the town, brown-faced, barefoot youngsters sat beside the roadway with their chubby legs a-dangle down the mossy stones, staring away into the south across the grassy levels of the valley of the Stour.
Gradually he bulked larger in the public eye, became an anchor of safety to whom the people turned after the war had worn itself out and scattered bands of banditti infested the chaparral to prey upon the settlers. This lean, brown-faced man walked the way of the strong. Men recognized the dynamic force of his close-gripped jaw, the power of his quick, steady eye, the patience of his courage.
A dozen brown-faced, booted young men stood about, three musicians were ready to take up their interrupted music, the little fat man who had called out the figures of the quadrille, stood on a barrel, his arms folded across his paunch. A fair-haired girl, her face marred by recent tears, drooped near him.
There was a woman crying: in a hopeless little way on the platform, and a girl with sorrowful, loving eyes leaning out of a second-class window towards her; there was a brown-faced squatter, in a tweed cap and slippers, to whom the three-hundred-mile journey was little more of an event than dining; and there was the young man going selecting, and thinking England was little farther, seeing his wife and child were waving a year's good-bye from the platform.
Of course, there were plenty of dogs quarrelling over bones near various fires, or sleeping with one eye open in odd corners, and everywhere tumbled and laughed and danced, brown-faced, lithe-limbed children, who looked uncannily Eastern.
David turned to the brown-faced, sad-eyed son of the mountain ranges, and said: "Come along and have dinner with us, won't you?" Carol pursed up her lips warningly, but Prince Ingram, in his eagerness, nearly picked David up bodily in his hurry to get the little party settled before some one spoiled it all. He wanted to handle Connie's chair for her, he knew just how it was done.
The brown-faced young man arose and went to meet them. I saw him return in close conversation with Jimmy Powers. Before they reached us he had turned away with a gesture of farewell. Jimmy Powers stood looking after him long after his form had disappeared, and indeed even after the sound of his wheels had died toward town.
The boy, who was about Frank's own age, but brown-faced and stoutly built, busied himself in clearing away the remains of the meal, and in carefully making up the fire with dry chips and shavings; he seemed to have caught the infection of silence from his companions, and eyed the stranger guest without speaking a word.
Under an awning over the rudder-deck, he sat observing the brown-faced wall of the city, and the pillars and cornices of the noble structures towering above it. As the vessel was about passing the Seven Towers, now a ruin with a most melancholy history, but in that day a well-garrisoned fortress, he conversed with the master of the galley.
Then I followed the rest into the hall, and found there a jolly, handsome, brown-faced sailor, evidently a son of the house. The old man received him with tears in his eyes, and the children with shouts of joy. The maiden escaped in the confusion, just in time to save herself from fainting. We crowded about the lamp to hide her retreat, and nearly put it out.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking