United States or Afghanistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Some of the sick men rose from their beds and stood with pale, fever-wasted faces at the doors of their wretched cabins, and smiled feebly and tried to shout as the noble woman drew near. Their voices were hollow and sepulchral, and the ministering angel who had visited them witnessed this moving spectacle not without tears.
I raised my voice not much above a whisper, and, noiselessly, an uncomplaining spirit in a fever-wasted body appeared in the light aft, the head with hollow eyes illuminated against the blackness which had swallowed up our world and the universe. The bared forearm extended over the upper spokes seemed to shine with a light of its own.
Extensive preparations were made; the whole city was in a flutter of excitement, and the people looked forward to a holiday such as Rome had not seen since the days of the Cæsars. But by this time the poet was dying, fever-wasted, in his lonely cell.
Cragstone turned impatiently, got his prayer-book, followed the trapper, took his place in the canoe, and paddled in silence up the bay. The moon arose, large, limpid, flooding the cabin with a wondrous light, and making more wan the features of a dying man, whose fever-wasted form lay on some lynx skins on the floor.
Then I bowed with profound dignity, and stepping from their view, disappeared. A few minutes later I emerged from my cave, a transmogrified being. I was no longer the derelict of rags and tatters. Mine was the opulent splendor of a High Mandarin of China. About my fever-wasted frame fell and flapped the gorgeous folds of the embroidered kimono. In my hands I carried a violin and bow.
"Yes," remarked Holden, the younger of the two men, as the rhythm of the dripping paddles murmured pleasantly with Nature's music heard from leafy bough and bush; "yes, Alf's a different boy now. Who would have believed that these three short months would have changed a fever-wasted body into such a sturdy frame?" "It looks like a miracle," returned the other man.
While, in that embrace, not only all the motherhood in her leapt up to claim the sonship in him, but all the womanhood in her leapt up to claim the manhood in him, thereby making the broken circle of her being once more wholly perfect and complete, so that carrying the whole dear burden of his fever-wasted body in her encircling arms and upon her breast, even as she had carried, long since, that dear fruit of love, the unborn babe, within her womb, Katherine was taken with a very ecstasy and rapture of content.
They looked up as the trim, lady-like figure stepped lightly down from the ambulance, and the long-absent luster returned briefly to their sad eyes. "That looks like home, Jim," said one of the fever-wasted. "That it does. Lord! she looks as fresh and sweet as the Johnny-jump-ups down by our old spring-house. I expect she's come down here to find somebody that belongs to her that's sick.
Bassett pondered, remembering his Browning and gazing at his skeleton-like and fever-wasted hands. And the fancy made him smile of Childe Roland bearing a slug-horn to his lips with an arm as feeble as his was. Was it months, or years, he asked himself, since he first heard that mysterious call on the beach at Ringmanu? To save himself he could not tell. The long sickness had been most long.
Word Of The Day