Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 9, 2025
It travelled up the motionless hand and reached the sleeve. With a smile on his lips Achilles entered the shop. He took down an empty fig-box and transferred the treasure to its depths, dropping in after it one or two leaves and a bit of twig. He fitted the lid to the box, leaving a little air, and taking the pen from his desk, wrote across the side in clear Greek letters.
An old hunting-crop, some feathers from pheasants' tails, part of a mole-trap, an old brazen bugle, much battered, a wooden fig-box full of rusty nails, several scraps of deal board and stumps of cedar pencil were heaped together in confusion. But these were not all, nor could any written inventory exhaust the contents, and give a perfect list of all that cupboard held.
The chains, or sausages, we did with dusters and not clean ones rolled tight, and the paper moulded gently to their forms. The plum-pudding was a newspaper ball. The mince-pies were newspapers too, and so were the almonds and raisins. The box of figs was a real fig-box with cinders and ashes in it damped to keep them from rattling about. The French-plum bottle was real too.
The brakeman looked at an object which the speaker held up as he spoke: it was a small fig-box, such as train-boys sometimes succeed in imposing upon the traveling public, and it still contained several figs. "Want it again?" said the brakeman, with a scornful curl of the lip that gave his black moustache a Mephistophelian twist, "of course not.
Then his eye fell upon it the music roll that had slipped quietly to the floor when her eager hand had lifted itself to touch the butterfly, opening and closing his great wings in the fig-box. He crossed to it and lifted it almost reverently, brushing a breath of dust from its leather sides.... He bent closer to it, staring at a little silver plate that swung from the strap.
Then he placed the box on the shelf behind him, where the wet ink of the lettering glistened faintly in the light. It was a bit of the heart of Athens prisoned there; and many times, through the cold and snow and bitter sleet of that winter, Achilles took down the fig-box and peered into its depths at a silky bit of grey cradle swung from the side of the box by its delicate bands.
His heart that had ached so long with its pent-up message of Greece the glory of her days, the beauty of temples and statues and tombs was freed by the tale of his lips. The world was new-born for him. He lifted the empty fig-box, from which the child had set free the butterfly that had hung imprisoned in its grey cocoon throughout the long winter, and placed it carefully on the shelf.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking