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Updated: June 19, 2025
"Well, three days before Christmas, just when things were looking gloomiest, there drifted up from the Cheyenne country one of the old timers. None of them had seen him in four years, though he had worked on that range before, and with the exception of myself, they all knew him. He was riding the chuckline all right, but Miller gave him a welcome, as he was the real thing.
Every woman has a right to be pretty in her own dining-room. I do not favor the dark, heavy treatments and elaborate stuff hangings which seem to represent the taste of most of the men who go in for decorating nowadays. Nine times out of ten the dining-room seems to be the gloomiest room in the house.
The butcher-boy had once even dared to fling that taunt at us within our own yard; and we left him in no doubt about the hammering, gallant fellow though he was and wore a spur on his left heel. But no bodily deformity could have corroded us as did those thrice-accursed garments with terror of the world without and of its laughter. Of a world yet more distant we were taught the gloomiest views.
Fixing upon him a look in which the gloomiest despair could be read, "Alas!" stammered the poor woman, "what can you do for me, sir? My life is ended. I have but one wish left, that of knowing where my husband is hid. It is not for me to judge him.
Thus, with the struggle for subsistence now keen to a degree which could not have been foretold by the gloomiest pessimist a few years ago; with Parliaments, hitherto safely democratic, threatened with Socialism by the increasing practice of electing artisans and labourers to do the legislative work of their respective classes; the crash of fortunes which never had substantial existence; the pauperising to-day of the paper millionaire of yesterday; the spectacle of worn, old men, after overreaching and ruining themselves, starting pitifully the race of life afresh, a sinister experience their sole advantage over the faltering novice; and that other common spectacle of democratic life, the secure and cultured rich cynically eschewing the active business of government, with these and some social aspects still less agree able to contemplate there is ample subject-matter for any novelist who may have the disposition and ability to carry on the work which Clarke had indicated, but scarcely begun, before he died.
It has more unmingled melancholy than was habitual to it before, even when in his gloomiest moods; but it is a melancholy much more soft and subdued; it is the melancholy of resignation that of a man who has ceased a long struggle paid his offering to the appeased Nemesis, in casting into the sea the thing that had been to him the dearest.
Like every one with a touch of the Celt in him, Aladdin was by turns gloomiest and most unfortunate of all mortals upon whom the sun positively would not shine, or the gayest of the gay. From his droll manner of singing a song, to the seriousness with which he sometimes bore all the sufferings of all the world, he seemed to her a most complex and unusual individual.
His sensitive pride of independence was not wholly extinguished. The children ate, and he blessed the hand of the giver for their sakes; yet, even while he did so, a feeling of weakness and humiliation brought tears to his eyes. His spirits were broken, and he folded his arms in impotent despair. While sitting wrapt in the gloomiest feelings, there came a knock at his door.
Overcome by fatigue and misery, he sat down upon a bench, where he remained sunk in the gloomiest thoughts until accosted by a man of repulsive aspect, branded on the face the Russian practice with criminals of the worst sort who said abruptly, "Get up and go to work." It was the overseer, himself a former convict.
Pray God we get better travelling as we are not fit as we were, and the season is advancing apace. Tuesday, February 21. Lunch Temp. -9 1/2°; Supper Temp. -11°. Gloomy and overcast when we started; a good deal warmer. The marching almost as bad as yesterday. Heavy toiling all day, inspiring gloomiest thoughts at times. Rays of comfort when we picked up tracks and cairns.
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