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Updated: May 25, 2025
"'This is the sort of life which you will have to lead, if you give yourself up to the guidance of those greybeards; and, after all, though you may have studied and studied, pored over their musty volumes, and listened to their tedious lectures, you are not sure of doing right. "'And who are these fellows who set themselves up for wise men? Do they always do right?
The Court is divided; for the exertions of Madame and the bewitching influence of Fashion have turned the heads even of greybeards: and to give you only one instance, his Excellency the Grand Marshal, protege of the House of Austria, and a favourite of Metternich, the very person to whose interests, and as a reward for whose services, our princely friend was sacrificed by the Minister, has now himself become a pupil in the school of modern philosophy, and drivels out, with equal ignorance and fervour, enlightened notions on the most obscure subjects.
And all these subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab's texture. Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-commanders, the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked deck.
Their life was dreary enough, for they could hold but little comradeship with the invalids, whom they dubbed "greybeards, drivellers, and kill-joys." But they had a guard-room to themselves, where they diced and drank, and told their ruffian stories, and sang their knavish catches, as is the manner, I suppose, for all soldiers to do in all countries, whether in camps or in cities.
The dancers are all men, young warriors and older men, but no greybeards. The orchestra consists of some half-dozen men, who clap together two sticks or boomerangs; in time to this "music" a wailing dirge is chanted over and over again, now rising in spasmodic jerks and yelled forth with fierce vehemence, now falling to a prolonged mumbled plaint.
Shall I blow away, and vanish into nothingness? It is that which affrights me!" And Drusus tried as best he might to comfort her, telling her there was no danger that she or he would be dissipated speedily, and that she must not fret her dear head with things that set the sagest greybeards a-wrangling.
Emaciated greybeards rode by the side of lean dark youths, marked by all the hardships of campaigning, with strips of raw beef twined round the crowns of their hats, and huge iron spurs fastened to their naked heels.
It was with heavy hearts that we said good-bye to our kind friends in Frankfort, for well we knew by this time what the passage of a British column meant for the defenceless non-combatants houses broken down and burnt, children and greybeards torn from their families, and all the other useless and unnecessary cruelties that have broken so many lives, converted so many joyous homesteads into tombstones of black despair, and imprinted into the very souls of many Afrikanders an ineradicable loathing and hatred of everything British.
'Workhouse, indeed! I have heard the same ancient well-to-do greybeards ejaculate, 'workhouse! they ought to be very thankful they have got such a place to go to!
Then, if I moved, neither head nor limb, others would come, and yet others, leaping from branch to branch and plunging down from higher to lower levels like divers cleaving a deep green sea; until at last some slightest involuntary movement of mine would put the whole host to flight, and greybeards, young warriors, camp followers and mothers with their children on their backs would spring precipitate from tree to tree, screaming and gibbering like Homer's sapless dead.
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