Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 4, 2025
"This perching on trees all day is fit to make an old man of a boy," said Humphrey, as he stepped clumsily about on his half-numbed feet. "Sh!" said Hugo. Humphrey instantly stood still in the darkness and listened. Weary and slow steps were approaching. They came nearer, and directly under the oak they ceased, for the spy, his pompous manner quite gone, had stopped to rest a little.
Standing there, he read certain passages of this transcription of his mental life. Finally, with a straightening of his figure, he took the books one by one, tore off the covers, and stuffed the closely written sheets into the flames. Afterwards, like one in a daze, he returned to the piano. It was his own, strange "Invocation to Death" to which his half-numbed fingers turned.
Half-numbed sounds came trickling into the chill street from under the organ-cloth: a sad once, perhaps, dance-provoking tune, which now, false, dragging and twisted out of shape, was like a muddled crawling of sounds all jumbled up together; some came too soon, the others too late, as in a weariful dream; and, in between, a sighing and creaking which came from very deep down, at each third or fourth turn, and was deadened again at once in those ever-recurring rough organ-sounds or dragged on and deafened in a mad dance.
Her fingers were half-numbed; but she was able to perceive the difference between the brown paper and the thick, strong cord, and again the difference between the thick cord and the sealing-wax. "How many seals are there?" she asked in a breathless, eager voice, turning and looking full at her sisters.
As of old the victims of the Inquisition, waking or dreaming, beheld ever before them the instrument of their torture, so before this woman's racked and half-numbed mind panoramically passed, an endless pageant, the incidents of the night which had cut her off from living men and women. She tottered on the border-line which divides sanity from madness.
"No water to signify," said the mate, as Billy Widgeon and Small baled hard till their dippers scraped the bottom without success. The captain did not speak, but pressed his wife's hand, while for the first time Mrs O'Halloran displayed emotion by taking her half-numbed child to her breast, and sobbing aloud.
Weston could dimly make out something that moved on in front of him, but it had no certain shape, and he stumbled heavily every now and then as the stones rolled round beneath him. He gripped the pack-horse's bridle in a half-numbed hand, but, as he admitted afterward, he made no attempt to lead the beast.
Then, weary, aching in every bone, and with throbbing head, he would rise and turn to fall upon his couch after his eighteen hours of steady toil. But the memory of Evelina Hanska always came to him; and with half-numbed fingers he would seize his pen, and forget his weariness in the pleasure of writing to the dark-eyed woman who drew him to her like a magnet.
My footsteps rang with a hollow sound through the vast, gloomy spaces of that cold, empty church; my very breathing seemed to find an echo in it. But these were not things to occupy my mind in such a season, no more than was the icy cold by which I was half-numbed yet of which I seemed to remain unconscious in the absorbing anguish that possessed me.
Then, as with the fury of a thunder-peal, there crashed in upon his half-numbed mind the significance of all that he had just seen and heard.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking