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Whether the right reverend or right honourable Thomas has ever taken his new-bought Baskerville to bed with him, as the Tommy that was has taken his humming-top, is a sort of case which has not actually come under observation in the course of my own clinical inquiries into the malady; but I am not prepared to state that it never occurred, and can attest many instances where the recent purchase has kept the owner from bed far on in the night.
I found the room reeling round in an uncertain way, like a labouring, humming-top. "Explain yourself," said I, holding on by one hand to an arm-chair. "Dear old darling Charley!" returned Edwin, in his cordial manner, "consider!
The mosquitoes would decide cases both civil and criminal, at a speed that would make a Judge of the Supreme Court as dizzy as a humming-top. Another Hindoo plan was for the accused to hold his head under water while a man walked a certain distance. If the walker chose to be lazy about it, or the prisoner had diseased lungs, this would be a rather severe method.
I have reason to believe, looking back upon this scene conducted by candlelight in the front parlour, that my Mother was much baffled by the logic of my argument. She had gone so far as to say publicly that no 'things or circumstances are too insignificant to bring before the God of the whole earth'. I persisted that this covered the case of the humming-top, which was extremely significant to me.
Taken, I suppose, at a disadvantage, my Father told me I must not pray for 'things like that'. To which I answered by another query, 'Why? And I added that he said we ought to pray for things we needed, and that I needed the humming-top a great deal more than I did the conversion of the heathen or the restitution of Jerusalem to the Jews, two objects of my nightly supplication which left me very cold.
O’Bleary,’ said the humming-top, turning round on his pivot, and facing the company, ‘what did you think of Vauxhall the other night?’ ‘Oh, it’s very fair,’ replied Orson, who had been enthusiastically delighted with the whole exhibition. ‘Never saw anything like that Captain Ross’s set-out—eh?’ ‘No,’ returned the patriot, with his usual reservation—‘except in Dublin.’
"Nothing broken on board?" asked Robur. "No," answered Tom Turner. "But we don't want to have another game of humming-top like that!" For ten minutes or so the "Albatross" had been in extreme peril. Had it not been for her extraordinary strength of build she would have been lost. During this passage of the Atlantic many were the hours whose monotony was unbroken by any phenomenon whatever.
'Poor Mountford Wilts boasted of knowing women; and he married. To jump into the mouth of the enigma, is not to read it. 'You are figures of conceit when you speculate on us, Mr. Whitmonby. 'An occupation of our leisure, my lady, for your amusement. 'The leisure of the humming-top, a thousand to the minute, with the pretence that it sleeps! Diana said.
His dwelling was so solitary and vault-like, an old, retired part of an ancient endowment for students, once a brave edifice, planted in an open place, but now the obsolete whim of forgotten architects; smoke-age-and-weather-darkened, squeezed on every side by the overgrowing of the great city, and choked, like an old well, with stones and bricks; its small quadrangles, lying down in very pits formed by the streets and buildings, which, in course of time, had been constructed above its heavy chimney stalks; its old trees, insulted by the neighbouring smoke, which deigned to droop so low when it was very feeble and the weather very moody; its grass- plots, struggling with the mildewed earth to be grass, or to win any show of compromise; its silent pavements, unaccustomed to the tread of feet, and even to the observation of eyes, except when a stray face looked down from the upper world, wondering what nook it was; its sun-dial in a little bricked-up corner, where no sun had straggled for a hundred years, but where, in compensation for the sun's neglect, the snow would lie for weeks when it lay nowhere else, and the black east wind would spin like a huge humming-top, when in all other places it was silent and still.
"'Come here, I said to the sentry. 'Look to your gun and unhorse that gallant for me and you shall have a silver ruble. "'Very well, your honour, only he won't keep still. "'Tell him to! I said, with a laugh. "'Hey, friend! cried the sentry, waving his hand. 'Wait a bit. What are you spinning round like a humming-top for?
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