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One of them, whose unhappiness it was to take the part of soubrette in the Laughable Commedietta preceding the burlesque, was so ill at ease in drapery, so full of awkward jerks and twitches, that she seemed quite another being when she came on later as a radiant young gentleman in pink silk hose, and nothing of feminine modesty in her dress excepting the very low corsage.
He knew that in a few more seconds his straining lungs would gulp in the stinging ooze, he knew his will could not prevent his drawing in some sort of breath. He clung desperately to the control of his diaphragm, as a falling man clings to a ledge of rock. His great chest muscles gave convulsive jerks. His control was going, going. Suddenly a human hand gripped his wrist.
For the scholar the hour is not an interval, but a coincidence, an instantaneous arrangement, and time is resolved into a dust of fixities, as in those pneumatic clocks in which the hand moves forward in jerks, marking nothing but a sequence of pauses.
"Yep," was the reply; "big rake with curved tines to it. You see he jerks his rake along until he feels it full, then pulls it up. Now, this feller, over on the other side here, he's not goin' after clams at all.
The party rode on in the slow, safe trot proper to night-time and bad roads, Farmer Darton's head jigging rather unromantically up and down against the sky, and his motions being repeated with bolder emphasis by his friend Japheth Johns; while those of the latter were travestied in jerks still less softened by art in the person of the lad who attended them.
"Did you ever see the like!" ejaculated Helen, deeply disturbed at finding both her direction and her subsequent summons unattended to. "That's just the way we are constantly served by these abominable creatures." Two or three heavy jerks at the bell rope followed these remarks. "Pull away! It's good exercise for you!" muttered Hannah to herself.
At the same time, if any one should wonder what the sensation is like, it is quite easy to measure seventy-five feet from the windows of a tall house or a block of flats, look down to the ground and fancy himself with some sixty other people crowded into a boat so tightly that he could not sit down or move about, and then picture the boat sinking down in a continuous series of jerks, as the sailors pay out the ropes through cleats above.
Spencer Birtwell, rousing himself from a heavy sleep as the bell was rung for the third time, and now with four or five vigorous and rapid jerks, each of which caused the handle of the bell to strike with the noise of a hammer. The gray dawn was just breaking. "There it is again! Good heavens! What does it mean?" and Mr. Birtwell, now fairly awake, started up in bed and sat listening.
The world, to be sure, tolerates still a great many things that it does not approve of, and, on the whole, Christmas, as an ameliorating and good-fellowship institution, gains a little year by year. There is still one hitch about it, and a bad one just now, namely, that many people think they can buy its spirit by jerks of liberality, by costly gifts.
"Sit down no don't stay a moment like this," said Tussie, his breath coming in little jerks, "unless you are tired? Did you walk?" "I'm afraid you are very ill," said Priscilla, leaving her hand in his and looking down at him with a face that all her efforts could not induce to smile. "Oh I'll be all right soon. How good of you to come. You've not been hungry since?"
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