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And, indeed, since Mohammed, no single mind had united within itself capacities so various in their power over the imaginations of men an energy of will, swift, sudden, terrifying as the eagle's swoop; the prestige of deeds which in his thirtieth year recalled the youth of Alexander and the maturer actions of Hannibal and Caesar; an imaginative language which found for his ideas words that came as from a distance, like those of Shakespeare or Racine; and within his own heart a mystic faith, deep-anchored, immutable, tranquil, when all around was trouble and disarray the calm of a spirit habituated to the Infinite, and familiar with the deep places of man's thought from his youth upwards.
But when he drops it, it is his no longer, but the eagle's, who fishes wonderfully in the air a game depending on the keenness of his sight, his strength, his quickness, and his skill; and the fish that belonged first to itself, and then to the osprey, belonged in the end to the eagle; and all this is according to the Law of Nature. Uncle Sam was not selfish about that fish.
You feel pleased at your own inventiveness and originality, when you are really like the wren when it took a lift on the eagle's shoulder. Old Peterson, you remember, used to have a similar effect upon you in the Linlithgow days. In the middle of dinner he plunged off, and came back with a round bag about the size of a pomegranate in his hand. "What d'ye think this is, Munro? Eh?"
A bullet, sir!" he volunteered as he limped beside me. "A shattered knee-cap to remind me of my vivid youth, an awkward limp to keep in my mind the lovely cause aha, she was all clinging tenderness and plump as a partridge then. I was her Eugenio and she my Sacharissa a withered crone to-day, sir, and, alas, most inelegantly slim, I hear bones, a temper, an eagle's beak and nut-cracker chin!
The vulture is like the eagle in size, and some of its habits; but it is so very different from it in many ways, that there is little danger of confusing the two together: the greatest distinction between them is, that the head of the vulture is either quite naked, or covered only with a short down, while the eagle's is well feathered.
With that sudden access of courage which usually results from the exhibition of fear in a foe, Bald Eagle's men yelled and gave chase. Bald Eagle himself, however, had the wisdom to call them back. At a council of war, hastily summoned on the spot, he said "My braves, you are a parcel of fools."
Willie Willders nodded his head approvingly, and, being exasperated into a savage serio-comic condition, as well by the Eagle's voice and aspect as by her sentiments, he said that she was quite right, and that if he were a lady like her he would hold the same opinions, because then, said he, "being stout, I could wallop my husband an' keep him down, an' the contrast of his ugly face with mine would not be so obvious."
Nicholas Barthes came in, a tall, slim, withered old man, with a nose like an eagle's beak, and eyes that still burned in their deep sockets, under white and bushy brows. His mouth, toothless but still refined, was lost to sight between his moustaches and snowy beard; and his hair, crowning him whitely like an aureola, fell in curls over his shoulders.
Rodney shared Hawke's general encomium, that "as far as fell within my notice, the commanders, their officers, and ships' companies, behaved with the greatest spirit and resolution." Rodney came under his close observation, for, the Eagle's "wheel being shot to pieces and all the men at it killed, and all her braces and bowlines gone," she drove twice on board the flag-ship.
... Who was it had asked her the same question, in another idiom ever so long ago? The man with the black eyes and nose like an eagle's beak, the one who gave her the compass. Not this man no! She answered, with the timid gravity of surprise: "Chita Viosca" He still watched her face, and repeated the name slowly, reiterated it in a tone of wonderment: "Chita Viosca? Chita Viosca!"
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