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They had the shapes of four Latin letters cut in a thin piece of wood, and then, having dipped the pen in the imperial ink used by the Emperors in writing, they put it in the Emperor's hand, and laying the piece of wood on the paper to be signed, they guided the Emperor's hand and pen round the outline of the four letters, making it follow all the convolutions cut in the wood, and then retired with the result as the Emperor's signature.
Around are marly mountain-flanks in wrinkles and gnarled convolutions like some giant's brain, furrowed by rivers crawling through dry wasteful beds of shingle. Interminable ranges of gaunt Apennines stretch, tier by tier, beyond; and over all this landscape, a grey-green mist of rising crops and new-fledged oak-trees lies like a veil upon the nakedness of Nature's ruins.
Adown the ravine rustled a seductive wind, melancholy with the taste of sodden, fallen leaves. Alvarita removed her hat, and undoing the oppressive convolutions of her hair, began to slowly arrange it in two long, dusky plaits. From the obscure depths of a thick clump of evergreen shrubs five feet away, two small jewel-bright eyes were steadfastly regarding her.
The body of this tree, bending outward, sent its long, nerveless leaves in a perpetual green rain to the surface of the stream, where sudden swarms of minnows, like shivers in a glass, assailed the deceptive bait. The roots of the tree great yellowish, twisted ropes of roots clutched air, earth, and water in their convolutions.
He was somehow sensible of its convolutions as he stood against the wall and strained his eyes into the dusk. Suddenly it was penetrated by a milky-white glimmer, a glimmer duplicated at equidistant points, each fading as its successor sprang into brilliance. The next moment he understood its significance. It had come from the blurred windows of the old ball-room.
It does not in any way invalidate the truth that a small brain with a simple pattern of convolutions is a less capable organ than the large brain with a complex pattern.
The landlord knew it, to be sure plainly he had made the same calculation twice and once before, but he wanted confidence in his own figures, and from the moment I showed myself so poor a second seemed to lose all interest in the result. The vale, as it opened out into the plain, was shallow, and a little bare, perhaps, but full of graceful convolutions.
It was the first time I had seen so closely and covering such a landscape the grey convolutions and hoary foliage of the olive; and all those twisted trees went by like a dance of dragons in a dream.
He was darting in and out among the convolutions of fluffy white clouds; was looping earthward in great, invisible volutes; catching himself on the upward curve and zigzagging away again, swimming ecstatically the high, clean air currents which the poor, crawling, earthbound ones never know. Johnny jarred back to earth and to the sordid realities of life.
I had been living in the quaint little house with as much comfort and unconsciousness as if it were a larger body, or a double shell, in whose simple convolutions Mrs. Todd and I had secreted ourselves, until some wandering hermit crab of a visitor marked the little spare room for her own. Perhaps now and then a castaway on a lonely desert island dreads the thought of being rescued.
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