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"To-morrow is no man's gift." David was about to answer, but chancing to raise his eyes above the Prince Pasha's head, his glance was arrested and startled by seeing a face the face of a woman-looking out of a panel in a mooshrabieh screen in a gallery above.
It being yet full early for my purpose I took to the woods, and presently chancing upon a little stream that bubbled pleasantly 'mid shady willows, I sat myself down within this greeny bower and fell to watching the hurrying waters of this brook and hearkening to its drowsy murmur.
A sergeant-major made his way back from the damaged section, and a young officer who was going forward to find out the extent of damage met him on the way. "Can I get through?" asked the officer. "I've got through," was the answer, "but it's chancing one's luck." The officer "chanced his luck," but did not expect to come back alive. Afterward he tried to analyze his feelings for my benefit.
He knew that no whale-boat should be out there, and he was quite certain no men in the Solomons were mad enough to be abroad in such a storm. But the hallucination persisted. A minute later, chancing to open his eyes, he saw the whale-boat, full length, and saw right into it as it rose on the face of a wave.
On Sunday morning, the 19th of May, chancing be under the weather, and consequently at home sitting by a window, I saw people flocking past the house and hastening toward the jail.
A few ran below to fetch small articles that they valued, but by that time the vessel was so low in the water, that there was little time to spare, and the captain began to urge haste. "Now then, lads, over the side with you," he said, chancing to look at Sam Shipton as he spoke!
Now, just as I turned away, chancing to look downward at the clear water directly below, I was amazed to see that an innumerable multitude of great fish, like unto those which I had seen on the previous night, were swimming from the weed-continent towards the island.
A gentleman confined in the women's part of the Prefecture, chancing to look down from a high window on the offices of the main building, saw beneath him eight men in the uniform of the Commune, one of them wearing much gold lace, who were saturating the window-frames with something from a bottle, and bedaubing other woodwork with mops dipped in a bucket that he presumed contained petroleum.
Or, if the reader has ever been present in a vast metropolis, on the day when some great national idol was carried in funeral pomp to his grave, and chancing to walk near the course through which it passed, has felt powerfully, in the silence and desertion of the streets and in the stagnation of ordinary business, the deep interest which at that moment was possessing the heart of man, if all at once he should hear the death-like stillness broken up by the sound of wheels rattling away from the scene, and making known that the transitory vision was dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment was his sense of the complete suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and affecting, as at that moment when the suspension ceases, and the goings-on of human life are suddenly resumed.
The air was heavy with the perfume of honeysuckle abloom in the hedges a warm, still air wherein a deep silence brooded, and in which leaf fluttered not and twig stirred not; but it was none of this I held in my thoughts as I strode along, whistling softly as I went. Yet, in a while, chancing to lift my eyes, I beheld the object of my reverie coming towards me through the shadows.
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