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Just at the moment when success had come to them after all their ingenuity and all their endeavours just at a moment when they could demand and obtain what terms they liked from Sir Henry to preserve the secret of the financial combine came this catastrophe. "Felix was a fool to have left his work only half-done," he remarked aloud, as though speaking to himself.

Many a tear was shed over the tokens of the little services she was wont to render, her half-done works, and pleasant studies so suddenly broken off, and all the time Hausfrau Johanna was running on with a lecture on the diligent preservation of her maiden discretion, with plentiful warnings against swaggering men-at-arms, drunken lanzknechts, and, above all, against young barons, who most assuredly could mean no good by any burgher maiden.

"Let us hear what you have to say." Then my lord began to speak; and before he was half-done I wished myself anywhere else in the world. For, as great men alone are capable, he could be as lavish of praise as of blame.

Among them nothing is half-done, neither houses, furniture, dikes, husbandry, nor revolutions; and they hold a monopoly of all that they undertake. The manufacture of linen, and that of lace, a work of patient agriculture and still more patient industry, are hereditary like their family fortunes.

"Wretch!" exclaimed the lady, "and fool as well as villain, who could not even execute the crime he had planned!" "I bid as fair for it as man could," replied Dryfesdale; "I went to a woman a witch and a Papist If I found not poison, it was because it was otherwise predestined. I tried fair for it; but the half-done job may be clouted, if you will." "Villain!

He was succeeded in the command of the squadron by Captain Sherard Osborne, an officer of equal determination, courage, and sagacity, who was not likely to leave any of the work he had undertaken undone, or half-done. Our three commanders proceeded in the same spirit to the execution of their duty.

Irma shuffled over on her crooked high heels and returned with the half-done pajamas. “That fo'-lady!” sighed Irma, “she sure gets on ma nerves. She's always hollerin' at me 'bout somethin'. She never hollers at the other girls that wayshe just picks on me.” And Irma continued with the True Woman: “There's another thing the True Woman should have and that's a good character....”

One is duly awed, but, to see the master at his best, back one goes from the Accademia to that marvellous bleak Baptistery which he left that we should see, in the mind's eye, just that very best. It was there, some years ago, as I stood before the half-done marvel of the Night and Morning, that I first conceived the idea of a museum of incomplete masterpieces.

The skilful hand that should have finished it had perhaps to grasp sword or spear in the last vain attempt to repel the assault of the invader, and we can only wonder over his half-done work, and imagine what untoward fate befell the worker, and for what unknown master, if he survived the sack, he may have exercised the skill that once gratified the refined taste of his Minoan lord.

Slighted work and half-done tasks are sins. "I am as good as they are"; "I do my work as well as they"; are cowardly maxims. Not what others have done, but perfection, is the only true aim, whether it be in the ball-field or in the graver tasks of life. Many people think that ambition is an evil weed, and ought to be pulled up by the roots. Shakespeare makes Wolsey say,