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"It is all a matter of guess," said Nelson, when tied down to a specific decision, "but the world attributes wisdom to him who guesses right." This is less true of the big questions and broad lines of contemporary history. There insight can discern really something of tendencies; enough to guide judgment or suggest reflection.
'I never undertook anything. How many guesses have you made as to the cause of your desertion to-day? 'Well, three or four. 'Have you made one as to the cause of Miss Brotherton's graciousness to you yesterday? 'At least I remarked the change. 'I will tell you. There was a short notice of some of your writings in a certain magazine which I contrived should fall in her way.
'That is like her, he murmured to himself; 'I wound and hurt her: she guesses I shall suffer for it, and, by way of setting up the friendly bond again, next day, without a word, she asks me to do her a kindness! Could anything be more delicate, more gracious!
Then, after a brief, considering pause, in which he narrowly examined the distant horseman's outfit: "Sort o' rec'nize him, too. Likely he's that bum guy with the dandy wife way up on Butte Creek. Whitstone, ain't it? Feller with swell folks way down east, an' who guesses the on'y sort o' farmin' worth a cuss is done in Ju Penrose's saloon. That's him sure," he added, as the man drew nearer.
But the most of them generally consisted of a series of trivial interrogations beginning usually with: “How old are you?” Owing to our beards, which were now full grown, and which had gained for us the frequent title of yeh renn, or wild men, the guesses were far above the mark.
Brown thought and guessed and surmised, but guesses and surmises were fruitless. He finished his dishwashing and began another of the loathed housekeeping tasks, that of rummaging the pantry and seeing what eatables were available for his luncheon and the evening meal. He spread the various odds and ends on the kitchen table, preparatory to taking account of stock.
She had once or twice received the electrical stimulus, to feel and be as lightning, from a seizure of facts in infinitesimal doses, guesses caught off maternal evasions or the circuitous explanation of matters touching sex in here and there a newspaper, harder to repress completely than sewer-gas in great cities: and her mother had seen, with an apprehensive pang of anguish, how witheringly the scared young intelligence of the innocent creature shocked her sensibility.
Dicky has just 'phoned up from the smoking room to ask me if my hour isn't up. How his voice clears away all the miasma of my miserable thoughts! Please God, Dicky, I am going to lock up all my old ideas in the most unused closet of my brain, and try my best to be a good wife to you! I will be happy! I will! "I'll give you three guesses, Madge."
Those who will be at the trouble to recall his guesses as to the future movements of the French in the Riviera, Piedmont, and Tuscany, in 1795 and 1796, as well as his own propositions to the Austrians at the same period, will recognize here the recurrence, unchastened by experience or thought, of a theory of warfare it is almost impossible to approve.
What has this clearcut dogma to do with the gentle guesses of philosophy, this optimism with the uncertainty of life and the future above all, what sympathy has this preposterous exultation with the misery of the world? "And how unlike, too, all this is to the spirit of the Man of Sorrows! We read that Jesus wept, but never that He laughed.
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